^o x 






% 



v , — , <£> ** s r 0^ ^ 












<** 



-Ho -J ~ 



%> V ,.1*0, % V % *<*0, 










\f j 



F ** 









$> ^ 




-0 V * 



V .<* 



; > A 0^ 



:> 



^^^^^ 



^ ^ 



v> *- Y *°.\ • 



<1 



°C 



%0^ 






*\^°- '-ym.*°&*> 



The Catholic Spirit 



IN 



Modern English Literature 



BY 

GEORGE N. SHUSTER 



'Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of eternity." 
Francis Thompson. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1922 

AU rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



rt 



«z 



& 



Copyright, 1922, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and eleetrotyped. Published May, 1922. 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



JUN 14 1922 

©CJ.A677135 



i~?C 



To 
FATHER CARRICO 

OF NOTBJE DAME 



FOREWORD 

Modern literature is largely made up of deliberate, 
if somewhat ornate, pamphleteering. It is a great 
written debate between the exponents of different ways 
of living and looking upon life. Never before have 
solutions so divergent been offered to the riddle of 
human destiny and never have the protagonists been 
more belligerent. We all feel that the older English 
letters were concerned with an established point of 
view; that, while Spenser was an Anglican and Milton 
a Puritan, their human creed, their idea of man, was 
substantially the same. But the pressure of these 
latter days has lain heavily on every kind of art; 
and literature has been forced to voice the protest or 
the defense of a multitude of individuals deriving their 
strength from sources which have very little in common. 
In many ways the influence of this state of affairs has 
been evil and has led to recklessness and perversity 
in the statement of opinion, as well as to the abandon- 
ment by a large portion of the reading public of any- 
thing like standards, not only of judgment but even of 
taste. On the other hand, there are many who as a 
result of the modern upheaval have grown quite tired 
of eccentricity and faddishness ; who are convinced as 
men otherwise circumstanced could scarcely be con- 
vinced, that some basic philosophy is needed to save 
art from ruinous futility. 



Vlll FOREWORD 

No other constructive force that has come into 
English literature during the nineteenth century is 
nearly so important as the Catholic spirit. By this 
I mean the Catholic way of living and of looking upon 
life; the understanding of the Christian traditions 
of European civilization, the acceptance of the princi- 
ples upon which those traditions were based, and con- 
fidence in their efficacy in modern life and letters. Of 
necessity this spirit is concerned with the Middle Ages 
from which modern England broke away, but its con- 
cern is not limited to lucarnes, alchemists, and Knights 
Templars. It is worth noting that a man may refuse 
(though it happens unfrequently) to recognize the 
supremacy of the Pope and still possess the Catholic 
spirit; that he may recognize that supremacy without 
having the spirit. What cannot be dispensed with is 
a sense of fellowship with the religious force which 
built up Europe from the ruins of Rome, which main- 
tained certain principles of human liberty and depend- 
ence on God, and which taught the Truth without which 
Beauty is either a corpse or an evil spirit. It will be 
the purpose of this little book to indicate how the 
Catholic idea gained power in England and how it went 
about using that power in literary art. The achieve- 
ment to be considered is really too large for adequate 
treatment in so small a space, but I shall make no 
long apology for that. 

In fact, the surprising thing is the general in- 
difference which has been manifested in critical circles 
to this really phenomenal wealth of energy. It is, I sup- 
pose, sheer inability to understand an alien point of 
view which has led the author of a popular manual to 
assert that Newman's conversion was the result of a 



FOREWORD IX 

feverish interest in ritual, and which has inspired the 
strangely myopic section on the Cardinal in the "Cam- 
bridge History of English Literature." I believe that 
the time has come when the reading public generally will 
find useful a franker and more coordinated statement 
of the workings of the Catholic spirit than it has been 
able to find. People go far in their inspection of prin- 
ciples nowadays, and will not be inclined to discounte- 
nance as narrow a tradition that was once broad enough 
to create the manifold reality of Europe and that has 
meant much to the England and America of our time. 
Catholics, of course, have an especial motive for know- 
ing more of the expression given to their views by liter- 
ary genius. In school and out of it there ought to be 
for them a way of getting a bird's-eye view of the situa- 
tion. 

I have tried to work in the spirit of filling this de- 
mand. The present book is devoted to the public rather 
than to the scholar and aims to convey a general im- 
pression rather than to enumerate a wealth of minute, 
if erudite, details. A good many books on literature, 
it often seems, are quite unliterary. Whenever possible 
an attempt has been made to give an idea of an author's 
personality and work without aiming directly at criti- 
cism; but proportion and common-sense both require 
some consideration of the relative importance of writers. 
Mistakes have undoubtedly occurred. Well, let them 
stand while we go to the business of a survey of modern 
Catholic letters, frankly, with no view of partisanship, 
and above all, with Pascal, on our knees. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VXQB 

Foreword . vii 

I The Days of Lost Tradition .... 1 

II Kenelm Digby and the Discovery of the 

Past 15 

III The Personality of Newman .... 33 

IV Newman the Thinker 56 

V Newman the Artist 13 

VI Leaders at Oxford and Captains of the 

Church 88 

VII Poetry and Three Poets 104 

VIII Francis Thompson the Master .... 127 

IX Inheritors 147 

X Ruskin, Pater, and the Pre-Raphaelites 166 

XI The Chroniclers of Christendom. . . 187 

XII Robert Hugh Benson and the Aging 

Novel 208 

XIII The Adventures of a Journalist: G. K. 

Chesterton . . 229 

XIV The Adventures of a Historian: Hilaire 

Belloc 249 

XV The Voice of Ireland 268 

XVI The American Contribution .... 294 

XVII Literature and the Vistas of the Cath- 
olic Spirit . 317 

Addenda 352 

xi 



THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 
IN 

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN 
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

CHAPTER ONE 

THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 

"The return of civilization to religion is like the return of the 
energy stored in coal to the heat of the sun." 

D. Merejkowski. 

THE Catholic Spirit has been, and is, hard at work 
in modern English literature. By "Catholic" is 
meant here nothing sectarian or narrowly con- 
troversial, but instead the broad, traditionally Chris- 
tian outlook upon life which through many centuries 
moulded European society into all but its ultra-modern 
forms. It antedated the agnostic and it superseded 
the pagan; it was both the enemy and the lover of 
Rome. Although inherently artistic, it condemned 
art for its own sake. We shall not try to account for 
it or to make an apology for what is so obvious that 
it has been ignored. Catholic art raised every struc- 
ture worth looking at that has been built since the days 
of the Parthenon and the Capitol; wrote the "Divina 
Commedia," the "Morte D'Arthur," and, to some ex- 
tent at least, the plays of William Shakespeare; and 
erected, finally, a social order in which the art of living 
was possible. There was nothing wooden or pedantic 

1 



2 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

about it anywhere, but instead a surprising vitality, 
as of old Adam forgetting his age: yet it stood like a 
rock on two points — belief in God and in Man. Theol- 
ogy and politics were written into its poetics. No 
workman in whom the Catholic Spirit breathed would 
have admitted that religion can be excluded from life 
and art. Christianity sent thousands of its representa- 
tives to death for a Roman holiday; it carried armies 
over pestilential wastes to the conquest of a blighted 
town; it was everywhere alarmingly reckless of life: 
but it tried honestly to make that life worth the trouble. 
Woman believed and was honored ; the slave was freed 
and the king became a slave. And from one end of 
Christendom to the other, the Miserere ended in a 
chorus of laughter. 

Gradually that spirit died out of the world and its 
sacred temples were profaned. During nearly four 
hundred years of English history it was reviled and 
spit upon, and then it returned, disguised at first, 
cautiously showing its face to friends until it had once 
more the right to sit in the market-place. It entered 
into the literature of England, wherever men lived 
again in the past of Christendom, wherever souls 
yearned for the faith and blessed peace that were sym- 
bolized by the spires of Lincoln and Canterbury, wher- 
ever the spell of modern pessimism was broken by 
sacramental mirth. Occasionally the hovels of the poor 
were shaken, and it got inside the gates of Oxford. 
Poets were thrilled with the rich music of mediaeval 
life, and thinkers battled with modern thought, clad 
in the armour of the schools. The world was shaken 
with memories and though many were heedless or dis- 
trustful or filled with rancour, those who loved them 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 3 

were given new courage and new vigour. They chanted 
songs that had long been forgotten and voiced hopes 
that had been changed into despair. While the world 
about them reeled in the din of its delusion, they stood 
serene; and when they wept their tears were pure. 
But they themselves shall tell the story of how they 
came to know the splendid continuity of Christendom, 
its interest in the fate of man, its trust in God. 



That excellent knight, Sir Thomas More, who laid 
his head on the block during the first year of Henry's 
usurpation, had been saddened with the vision of evils 
which were to come over an England that had long 
been popular and merry and Christian. "Your shepe," 
he said, thinking of the growing tendency to oust the 
tenants from land that could be used for grazing, 
"that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal 
eaters, now, as I heare say, do become so great devow- 
erers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow 
ctowne the very men themselves." Sir Thomas did not 
live to witness the full rapacity of those sheep or of 
the wolves that went about in their clothing. He did 
not see the fiendish greed that would consume every 
bulwark in which the common man took refuge: the 
sacking of merciful monasteries, the bitter tyranny of 
kings and queens with lust in their bowels and blood 
in their eyes, the hunger and sickness of millions for 
whom there would be at length no refuge but the slavery 
of industrial towns, or the final darkness that would 
sit heavily on England's soul. He died in testimony to 
the past, and mindful of his serenity we shall hasten 
over the days of the democratic downfall, merely noting 



4 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

how every principle which the religious conscience had 
set up in defense of the poor was spurned; how the 
artistic impulse that had made of life a beautiful and 
holy thing was torn from the hearts of men ; and how, 
at last, the very memory of the older Faith and the 
older Happiness was beaten into the dust by warriors' 
horses, the silken trains of courtesans, and all that 
musty paganism which is as brutal as it is proud. 
Verily, these were sheep that "swallowed downe the 
very men themselves" and they were remembered again 
and again, till even a gentle and sickly poet cursed them 
in his "Song of the Shirt." The middle years of the 
century into which that poet was born were indeed 
the days of the lost tradition, when England that had 
been gay was sad, and the throne of Edward a pedestal 
for gain. 

The eighteenth century was sallow, stale. Over 
all of Europe walls began to crack, buttresses to sag. 
The humanistic solvent of the Great Revolt had 
steadily undermined the authority of the Church, but 
it was a long while at work before society began every- 
where to decay. Clergy and nobility were, in the higher 
ranks at least, separated from the people by the new 
egoism of wealth; the sacred marks of consecration 
were not on their souls. France especially was rest- 
less. Under the thrusts of Voltaire, whose acrid pen 
was never at rest, tradition began to totter; and the 
false but fierce philosophy of the Encyclopedists stood 
out strong by comparison. Then, Rousseau, the watch- 
maker's son of Geneva, made the world believe that his 
drugged dreams of a perfect social order were capable 
of realization. Rousseau not only discovered a world 
by his writings, but conquered it also ; and the already 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 5 

unstable structure of Boudbon society was doomed. 
In vain would his Lordship call for "Order" while he 
doubled the tithes ; crass convention was at the death- 
grapple with radical vision. Add to this a new and 
widespread skepticism in matters of religion, and you 
will understand the eighteenth century soul. There 
were, at first, the French critics and dreamers; there 
was at the end the great Goethe, who is like a glass 
of Burgundy in a pint of Prussian beer — both strong 
and flat. Everywhere the sufficiency of human reason 
was candidly assumed, and "Unknown" was subtly writ- 
ten over the name of God. 

England, however, with much less to conserve was 
vastly more conservative. There was little demand 
for a change of political regime. What religion re- 
mained was firmly welded with the State, and the State 
was powerful, even though it would have to battle with 
revolutionary colonists in all its domains. Almost as 
if by design, the classes for whom reading was possible 
developed a code of genteel utilitarian morals slightly 
diluted with aristocratic sentiment. Aristotle came 
into his own and both the "Poetics" and the "Ethics" 
were consulted with some gusto. Except for the manly 
squirearchy of Fielding there is little in eighteenth cen- 
tury fiction which contains the substance of demo- 
cratic thought. In general the novelists understood 
only one worth-while thing, laughter, and this the pre- 
modern Englishman seldom forgot. The representative 
thinkers followed the French lead to its ultimate con- 
clusion and were either relentlessly Scotch or stubbornly 
British. The unstable epistemology of John Locke, 
the staid, cold skepticism of David Hume, the bitter 
and cruel politics of Hobbes, were adaptations of 



6 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

French thought to the more conservative attitude of 
an insular public; it seemed that men would gradually 
abandon, for the sake of a callous phrase, what re- 
mained of the decent philosophy of their fathers. His- 
tory, which is philosophy in action, was courted by a 
brilliant pagan who appreciated fully the historic im- 
portance of the Gospel's success over the mandates of 
the Emperors. "It was at Rome, on the 15th of Octo- 
ber, 1764," says Gibbon, "as I sat musing amid the 
ruins of the Capitol while the barefoot friars were sing- 
ing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of 
writing the decline and fall of the city first started to 
my mind." His "Decline and Fall" was a gorgeous and 
stately tyrant who closed the doors to the mediaeval 
narrative for many years, and supported the impres- 
sion, not yet dead, that the science of history must 
confine itself to ancient and modern times. What a 
mass of nonsense about "dark ages" and "mummery" 
and "ignorance" was used to blanket the fires of the 
most amazingly active and speculative era in human 
annals! Instead we got the private -scandals of Medes 
and Parthians, Roman bankers and prehistoric fossils ; 
"progress" and "evolution" and "freedom" and a hun- 
dred other perversions of common nouns, which the 
most prevaricating of mediaeval annalists would have 
been ashamed to use. 

Again it was a man from the midst of the people 
who rallied all that was most charitable in the friendly 
world of letters ; and Doctor Johnson, brusque of figure 
and mellow of heart, guided the Irish Goldsmith as 
well as any man could. Johnson made a thousand 
errors in judgment and taste, but he was the only per- 
son in the land who understood what the author of 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 7 

"The Deserted Village" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" 
was worth. For that delightful vagabond remembered 
the death-cry of the poor, despoiled of property as 
well as freedom, and faced the hard syllogisms of 
Adam Smith with simple fact. One of the truths which 
humanity can never part with is that laissez-faire 
will never do ; and if in Goldsmith's songs of a dying 
peasantry there runs the wail of a dirge, it was some- 
thing to have sung it in the teeth of commercial pride. 
Johnson's other good deeds were numerous and his 
heart was right ; he was the Englishman at his level 
best. 

In still another way Art made a final stand. Poetry, 
deathless in spite of death, forgot the taunts of Pope 
and the smooth controversy of Dryden and murmured 
some of the old hymns. Gray, Warton, Percy, Chat- 
terton — all of them caught glimpses of ancient chiv- 
alry lost on haggard moors and set down something of 
what they had seen. A certain ploughman, whose name 
was Robert Burns, told more of human nature than 
the professors in his country had dreamed of. But 
through all of these and through the visions of Blake, 
the virulence of Byron, and even the nature-worship 
of Wordsworth, the face of Rousseau looked out, bath- 
ing in the smiles of Ceres, lost in the morning dew. 
They could not alter the fact that Europe had been 
built at the foot of the Cross and that its faith was 
dead. Old Triton and his horn were silent, indeed; 
chimney arose on chimney, loom next to loom, and 
around them were built the shambles of the new serfs. 
There was precious little religion left, just as there 
was no great freedom. The old stories of the Saints 
were derided; pilgrims no longer went to the rifled 



8 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tomb at Canterbury, or clerks to Oxford. The former 
place was asleep and the latter was drinking port. 
A people that had been forbidden to utter the Virgin 
name of Mary was taught the monstrous fetish of 
the virgin-queen. 

Meanwhile the peasant struck in France and the 
King went down. In his stead the minions of the new 
philosophy settled themselves in the judgment seat, 
the guillotine struck off heads with a kind of voluptu- 
ous cruelty, and men gathered in the temples to worship 
the goddess of reason. When the butchery had finally 
ceased and the standards of Napoleon had been furled 
forever, a new religious fervour was born out of the 
hearts of tired men. Chateaubriand in France, Gorres 
and Chamisso in Germany, and Manzoni in Italy began 
to look back upon the bright days of Christendom and 
to hunger for the things of the soul. It seemed for a 
time that the powerful missionary spirit of Art had 
returned, but the destruction had been too complete. 
Wonderful things were accomplished in the face of 
odds ; but the sadness of the romantics was only too 
prophetic, only too profoundly real. 

England escaped political revolution and the people 
continued in their silence. Instead, the spirit of change, 
of Liberty, entered into literature and uprooted its 
conventions, despite the beautiful pathos of Edmund 
Burke. There was the atheistic rebellion of Shelley 
and Byron, Godwin and Mary Woolstonecraft : Eng- 
lish Voltaires and Rousseaus respectively, lashed into 
fury by the cant of the prevailing civilization. And 
then, far greater and more influential than any of these, 
appeared the perennially virile Sir Walter, enchanted 
spectator of a thousand vanished tournaments, de- 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION V 

light ful magician of trysts and trappings, knights 
and fair ladies, of the whole picturesque life of the olden 
time. But though he sent all the world into a feverish 
study of heraldry, he was unconcerned with the soul 
of Christendom, the spirit which had created these 
thousand rapturous symbols for its inward joy. 
Bluntly, Scott was neither democratic nor spiritual, 
though his influence made in the end for both qualities 
throughout Europe. The people were best represented 
by a strange and violent journalist whose copy brought 
him eventually into Parliament, but never far away 
from his folk. In his "History of the Reformation" 
William Cobbett emphasized one tremendous matter 
which the student of the period had generally neglected 
— the spoliation of the poor. Through him was voiced, 
with a passion often boorish enough, their protest, 
which the philosophers and historians had apparently 
forgotten. 

When Victoria came to the throne, the English had 
practically settled down to a smug admiration for 
trade. The girl-queen governed an Empire larger — 
and more cruel — than Cassar had dreamed of. This 
Empire had forgotten nearly all the traditions of Eng- 
lishmen, being immensely more interested in the heathen. 
Commerce was god, and commerce implied a territorial 
policy, military force, and a continuous debate in Par- 
liament over the subjugation of the Irish or the Hindus. 
Such an enormous scheme had little to do with the 
public, although occasionally it would be pestered by 
a publicist. The mob stayed speechless, but it was 
a subject for conversation — a subject written in the 
miseries of a thousand industrial towns, in the crooked 
streets of London, in the quiet districts where men had 



10 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

kept their freedom. But for all of this the powers 
that ruled felt more or less contempt. That so good 
and great a man as Lord Macaulay could be utterly 
misled is significant of the times: he made his best 
speech against workingmen and his best poetry about 
Rome. It is not surprising either that Lord Mon- 
mouth, when talking of the established religion, should 
have felt the emotions of Caius Julius. These matters 
meant very simply that the popular institutions of the 
past had been swallowed up in a gigantic utilitarianism 
whose efficiency and refinement were utterly pagan. 
The most Christian thing economics could do was to 
use a French phrase ; education confined itself to teach- 
ing wealthy boys how to quote Virgil and how to 
despise their neighbors ; and the height of religious 
fervour was to sing a song for the Queen. 

An hour had come, however, when this apparently 
fixed alignment would be violently assailed. First, 
England awoke to the giant protest of Charles Dickens. 
Here was a man, amazingly ignorant of ever so many 
historical details, who read history correctly; who was 
an optimist and yet a rebel; who walked the dirtiest 
streets of London and shook with laughter while his 
heart bled. Dickens' importance cannot be valued too 
highly, for, although he created no disturbance, he 
did create people — a mob of people whom nobody can 
put down and nobody ignore. They broke through 
the priggishness of the Victorian era as a hod-carrier 
might disturb an ethical society. Still, after this 
stupendous sermon on charity, the world went to din- 
ner and to bed, a little more kindly, a little more rest- 
less, but essentially the same world. 

Then there followed in quick succession a series of 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 11 

surprising outbursts against the "progress" which 
Macaulay had so highly complimented. John Ruskin, 
angry with the interminable smokestacks and their 
soot, inspected modernity by the light of Beauty and 
found it decidedly shabby ; for a while he contented him- 
self with praising the art of the older time, but finally 
he understood, nearly, that art cannot be dissociated 
from life, and he even tried to restore civilization. 
Ruskin's greatest hindrance was Mont Blanc ; some- 
how he never managed to look around it and see what 
lay beyond. Next, a dyspeptic Scotchman, who prided 
himself on "four walls" and some brains, discovered 
the amazing mediocrity of his environment, measured 
it by the rule of genius, and cursed it roundly. Carlyle 
was a good and worthy man but with all these prescrip- 
tions he did not even cure himself. The Positivists, 
from George Eliot to John Stuart Mill, consoled them- 
selves with an altruistic version of the new gospel, advo- 
cated a thousand things which nobody would take, 
and died wondering at the folly of the world. It re- 
mained to suggest Culture pure and simple, and this 
Matthew Arnold did skillfully ; but, though he has been 
quite largely complimented by the professors, Mrs. 
Grundy has lent a disdainful ear. George Meredith 
examined society by the gleam of nature's dawn, and 
Browning counseled vigour and exuberance. Thus one 
by one the thinkers railed at John Bull, but that stolid 
gentleman went on unperturbed. 

The upshot of all this criticism was that the power 
of reason came at last to its goal. It scrutinized the 
bases of religious belief as matters quite independent 
of its own needs ; and with the great catapult of Evolu- 
tion set the entire structure of popular theistic opinion 



12 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to tottering. Was it because man had become so like 
an ape that he was willing* to concede that his ancestor 
was one? At least here was the paradox of reason 
equalling itself to Everything and consenting also to 
be Nothing. There came over England the final dark- 
ness: loneliness, the boredoom of being alone. Soli- 
darity of intellectual effort was destroyed ; step by step 
idiosyncrasy usurped the seat of originality and so- 
ciety pursued unbelievable philosophic tangents. The 
powers of the State increased, as the meaning of man 
was lessened. Force was worshipped either with frank 
rejoicing or with bitter acquiescence. And even tears 
were idle things, "from the depths of some divine de- 
spair." 

As not the least of the energies loosened against 
the complacency of the English mood, the Catholic 
Revival appeared. Wherever the religious spirit was 
strong, whether in poet or preacher,, there developed a 
concern with the beautiful faith of the past, with its 
sacraments and saints, with its manifest confidence in 
the voice of God. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, 
the members of a creed that had long been despised as 
impotent and ridiculous stood with their loins girt 
for battle and recruited some of the most brilliant 
minds of Britain. Whereas there had been no great 
Catholic apostle in the country since the days of Cam- 
pion and More, a dozen now moved the hearts of men; 
whereas the poetry of the old religion had been silent 
since Crashaw, singers took up the Catholic lyre with 
abounding and brilliant gifts ; and even the press, 
grown more tolerant, carried the defenders* voices to 
the ends of the earth. The challenge of the modern 
mind was accepted and even forestalled: the mission- 



THE DAYS OF LOST TRADITION 13 

ary now coveted battle as he had once sought martyr- 
dom. Christendom, as the Great Tradition that 
guarded the rights and guided the aspirations of com- 
mon humanity, won crowds of men by its new exposi- 
tions of the beauties of the faith and by the honesty 
of its literary effort. New voices stirred in shrouded 
Ireland, and the testimony of Britain lent confidence 
to the army of God that struggled in Europe. The 
issue between belief and denial has now become clear 
everywhere, and the modern philosophers, who scoffed 
at Christendom as something withered and outgrown, 
have discovered its branches over their heads. And 
even the critics shall have' to reckon with the Cross. 

The story of the Catholic Spirit working in modern 
English letters is at once the record of a movement 
and the biography of strong men. If literature be the 
expression of great personalities considering general 
truths, it is no less a series of flaming windows where 
the colour of Life is broken and reflected under the 
arches of towering minds. We shall deal here with 
many fascinating men; with books that have brought 
answers to numberless hearts ; with the victories and 
failures of literary effort. Most of all, however, we 
shall deal with the Spirit which any of these men valued 
more highly than life or success, their insight into and 
love for the sanctity of their hope. We shall scarcely 
divine their purpose or their meaning unless we re- 
member that, while facing the modern opponent where- 
ever he appeared, they worshipped the beauty of the 
past. Behind them is the synthesis of mediaeval life, 
with the fervent symbolism of its cathedrals, the robust 
nobility of its moral code, and the success of its 
popular society. They kneel at shrines at which for- 



14 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

gotten artisans laid down the glory of their buoyant 
lives and before which pilgrim and Crusader, saint 
and king, begged forgiveness of their sins. They go 
into battle gayly, but their voices tremble with the 
melody of dead songs. Only, they believe that the old 
realities can be again a reasonable ideal, and they have 
faith in God. 

BOOK NOTE 

In addition to the works mentioned — More's "Utopia," Gold- 
smith's "The Deserted Village," Boswell's "Life of Johnson," Cob- 
bett's "Reformation" — see the following: "The Present Position 
of Catholics," by J. H. Newman; "The Eve of the Reformation," 
by Dom Gasquet; "The Victorian Age in English Literature" and 
"Notes on Charles Dickens," by G. K. Chesterton; "A Social and 
Political History of Western Europe," by Carleton Hayes (2 
vols.) ; "La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre" — Vol. I. — by 
Paul Thureau-Dangin ; "Memories," by Kegan Paul, and the later 
volumes of "The Cambridge History of English Literature." Of 
interest also are the "Lives" of Gibbon, by J. Cotter Morison, of 
Hume, by T. H. Huxley, and of Locke, by Thomas Fowler. The 
files of the Tablet, the Dublin Review and the Catholic World 
contain indispensable information not available elsewhere. 



CHAPTER TWO 

KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 

"Neither for gold nor for gifts did I undertake this book so 
great and difficult . . . only, I prayed that ray book might be 
beautiful." 

Gaelic monk, XIIth century. 

THE discovery of a romantic past and its appli- 
cation as a creative force in literature was due, 
beyond any doubt, to the genius of Sir Walter 
Scott. His festive mind, browsing amid heaps of rag- 
ged books which the generations immediately preceding 
had frowned upon, and searching the landscape of Scot- 
land for the sites of chivalric prowess, admired the 
Christian Ages for their picturesque strength. Scott's 
neighbors had largely tired of the sour, matter-of-fact 
philosophy which had been provided for them, and read 
his tales with abounding delight. The virility of the 
Waverly Novels was a tremendous thing; on account 
of them new literary currents began to move in Europe 
generally, and America imbibed so much of their 
teaching that Mark Twain's diatribe on the chivalry 
of the South was by no means directed at an abstrac- 
tion. Sir Walter, however, was quite content with the 
role of entertainer, and it was probably as much of 
a surprise to him as to anyone when a French disciple 
of Rousseau, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, followed 
him into the romantic past, accepted the old faith, and 

15 



16 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

published the first part of "La Genie du Chris tianisme" 
just as the hells of Notre Dame were ringing out again, 
after a silence of twelve years. 

In this and in his subsequent defenses of the Catholic 
Spirit Chateaubriand missed something of the peace of 
God ; as a French critic says, he "presents Christianity 
not as a safe port amidst the storm, but rather as the 
storm itself which would carry men into a new world." 
He had more than a little of the pose of an explorer 
who is enthusiastic over dim vistas in the distance, but 
quite sadly certain that he* can never reach them. Fol- 
lowing his guidance, the* European literature of the 
nineteenth century exhausted the force, the melody, and 
the melancholy of the imagination, sometimes ap- 
proaching the Cross, sometimes ending in bitter dis- 
enchantment. It was an unbalanced, an unsteady 
movement and one is not surprised that its last great 
disciple should* have advised people to be "always 
drunken." But intoxication is, after all, better for 
the soul than mortal thirst. 

He to whom England owes the first strong and deep 
presentation of the Spirit of the past, not in its ex- 
ternal prettinesses only, but in its inner radiance, is 
a man whose name means little to the average modern 
reader; whose books have suffered the saddest of all 
defeats, obloquy at the press ; but whose message has 
nevertheless brought memorable joy to those who have 
sought it out. Kenelm Henry Digby, the author of 
"The Broad Stone of Honour," "Mores Catholici," 
and "Compitum," master of the literature of dead cen- 
turies, and heritor of the spirit of Godfrey and St. 
Francis, is a name to love even if that affection in- 
volves sacrifice. Who can say that he has read through 



KENEIiM 'DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 17 

this encyclopedia of Christian piety and charity, as 
vast in its volume as the "Comedie" of Balzac, as 
learned as Mommsen's "History"? Still, it was 
through Digby that the Catholic Spirit entered once 
more 1 into English letters, got into Cambridge — where 
men still follow the vision — and moved the pen of Rus- 
kin. 

His life was given to the ancient story with the 
rarest filial devotion : he wrote not because men praised 
or even read his work, but because he loved what he 
had to say. Digby was the Pius JEneas of the past, 
"the Fra Angelico," as Canon Barry says, "of Chris- 
tian Apologetics." The newer books on medievalism 
are simply restatements or criticisms, sometimes force- 
ful and popular in manner, of truths which he under- 
stood, of thoughts which he cherished, of facts which 
he had gathered. Digby did more than study the his- 
tory of Christendom; he saw it, lived in it with aban- 
don, a master of its many moods, but sublimely and 
constantly aware of its central theme. Perhaps the 
greatest reason why he should be remembered is that he 
was always himself without ever being selfish. There is 
even a way in which he seems the complement of Dante : 
he stirred the ashes, so that the fire of the great Floren- 
tine might burn more brightly. 

Long before Newman's voice aroused the soul of 
Oxford, Digby had found his way into the Church, 
having been baptized in 1825, shortly before the con- 
version of his lifelong friend, Ambrose Phillips de Lisle. 
The change was due quite simply to his concern with 
the past. Long before there had been a Sir Kenelm 
Digby who returned from his travels abroad a Catholic, 
a gentleman, and a defender of the Faith, even if a 



18 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

somewhat unsteady one ; the blood of Sir Thomas More, 
that pattern of Christian knighthood, ran in the family. 
Was it their spirit which lead the youthful Digby into 
the Church ? At least he went "their great and gracious 
ways," mingling his historical studies with journeys 
through all the Catholic lands until he had gathered 
sufficient material for "The Broad Stone of Honour." 
The first edition of this fine tribute to Christian tradi- 
tion appeared while the author was still an Anglican, 
but the changes made necessary by his religious con- 
version were slight. It seems almost that Digby was 
born a Catholic, for the strength and humility with 
which he practiced his religion throughout life are testi- 
fied to by every page he wrote. In the midst of nearly 
superhuman labour that was rewarded with compara- 
tive neglect, he preserved the modest poise of a gentle 
saint for whom the final day of beatitude is the goal 
of life. 

The details of his career have been recently set forth 
in a fine volume by Bernard Holland; we shall con- 
sider here only those matters which are indispensable 
for a proper knowledge of Digby's work. He was born, 
most probably, in 1790 — the date seems uncertain— 
and died at Kensington on March 22, 1880. Trinity 
College, Cambridge, received him in 1815 as a candidate 
for the degree in Arts, and he distinguished himself 
by pulling "number seven" in Trinity's first famous 
boat. Almost to the end of his life Digby preserved 
a fondness for sport, and his books are dotted with en- 
thusiastic references to swimming exploits, boating 
on the Thames and elsewhere, mountain expeditions, 
and outings in general. None the less, he devoted 
himself assiduously to study, having profited by the 



KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 19 

wise guidance of a splendid tutor, the Rev. Julius C. 
Hare, of Whewell. In those days anything smacking 
of mediaevalism was quite generally derided, and Scho- 
lastic philosophy was scorned, without being, in the 
slightest way, known; yet it was along these forbidden 
paths that Digby came into the Church. Ambrose 
Phillips, the intimate companion mentioned previously, 
fostered Digby's bent ; he was a man of very idealistic 
principles, who later spent his forces in trying to bring 
the Anglican High Church as a body to Rome. The 
later private life of Digby was rather tranquil. He 
was happily married and became the father of five 
children, enjoyed the friendship of numerous gifted 
men, but bore many a severe trial and lived for some 
time in dire financial straits. 

His personality remained charming to the end of 
his eighty-two years, and in personal appearance he 
was most striking. Fitzgerald describes him as "a 
grand, swarthy fellow who might have stepped out of 
the canvas of some knightly portrait in his father's 
house." A more definite reminiscence is Mr. Holland's, 
"A chivalric figure, over six feet in height, strongly 
built, with dark hair and eyes, a fine forehead." One 
cc:n easily fancy such a man going on those long voy- 
ages to remote and romantic places, which carried him 
through Spain and France, Austria and Germany, 
but it is not so easy to recall him bent over aged and 
archaic volumes, with the scent of midnight oil strong 
on his own folios. Only, those tomes, with their dim 
records of ancient glory, were for him more golden 
than doubloons and more rare than Inca gems. He 
was the hunter of priceless words which the pirates had 
buried, they thought, forever. 



20 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Let there be no misunderstanding of Digby's manner. 
Literature is quite largely a matter of style, and what 
shall we say of the method in which this prodigious 
man sought to put down his impressions? For every 
one of his books he made, indeed, a carefully unified 
plan which he took care to expound in the introduction, 
but which nobody could possibly follow through the 
maze of his writing. As he set down in language a 
single, 'sober thought, a thousand illustrations ap- 
parently crowded themselves into his pen, and he wrote 
out all of them, one after another, with an extraordi- 
nary disregard for sequence. The essays of Montaigne, 
which among other ancient writings may have served 
Digby for a model, are packed with quotations and 
examples, but these are always inlaid into the discourse 
with a Gallic nicety. Digby surpasses even Montaigne 
in the number and variety of his 'instances and saws, 
but, though they illustrate a point, they follow along 
helter-skelter, with a weird commingling of Greek and 
Latin, French and Old English, that is altogether 
amazing. What other writer would mass together a 
line from Cicero, Richard de Bury's curious instruc- 
tions on the care of books, anecdotes of Blessed Thomas 
More, and legends of the Saints? His books are 
mosaics, most ingenious and sometimes most interesting, 
but always mosaics. 

When his own English becomes master of a page or 
two, it is pleasantly archaic, with occasional striking 
turns, even epigrams, with which he says things that are 
as good as anything he quotes. Thus, in "Evenings 
on the Thames," this remark follows a formidable 
array of citations : "In fact, to have a taste for serene 
hours *is to have a taste for heaven." Not even St. 



KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 21 

Francis de Sales could have uttered a more admirable 
sentence! It is Digby's indomitable enthusiasm which 
carries him steadily along; all the details of his study 
seemed to him so valuable that he could not bear the 
loss of one of them, and his profound humility led 
him to believe, poor fellow, that the dictum of a saint 
or a chevalier was infinitely more important than any- 
thing which he himself might say. Digby has chapters 
on ecclesiastical art, as learned as, and perhaps truer 
than, Huysmans' "Cathedrale" but how very much 
more personal and effective the latter is ! Had Digby 
been more of an egoist he would have earned greater 
fame, at the price of being a meaner man. As it is, 
the reader will scarcely grow interested in books like 
"The Broad Stone of Honour" unless his enthusiasm 
for the ages of faith is great, unless he possesses the 
spiritual loadstone which will coordinate these multitu- 
dinous details as Digby did, and unless he is charmed 
by the utter self-abandonment of a marvelously mag- 
nanimous man. A reader who meets these requirements 
could live happily on a desert isle with "Mores Catho- 
lici" for his sole companion. 

Digby's writing, enormous though it is in volume, is 
singularly unified in theme. Predominantly the his- 
torian, he read the past by the light of a beautiful 
philosophy, which is saved from extravagant idealism 
by a deep consciousness of the reality of the Faith. 
His teaching is happiest when done by a sort of poetic 
pantomime, and when he ventures into abstractions 
there is likely to be a touch of bathos. Above all, 
Digby was a man, and no trait of writing is more prom- 
inent than his affection for the heroic character. 
"Mores Catholici" is a vast storehouse of information 



22 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

on mediaeval life that lays, of course, no claim to the 
rigid impartiality of the modern monograph. In it 
Digby attempts to show that the Ages of Faith were 
exemplifications of the eight beatitudes, and that they 
built up the ideal state, from which later eras have 
unfortunately departed. With what affection he fol- 
lowed those wonderful years of the saint and the hero, 
years which the mass of men now think the creation of 
poetry or even darkness ! Their songs were for him 
the symphony of the eternal unseen, fingering the hearts 
of men, and his joy in the melody was often nigh to 
tears. In the opening chapter of "Mores Catholici" 
Digby synthetizes all that he has to say in a glowing 
paragraph : 

"The Middle Ages were ages of highest grace to 
men; ages of faith; ages when all Europe was Catho- 
lic; when vast temples were seen to rise in every place 
of human concourse to give glory to God, and to exalt 
men's souls to sanctity; when houses of holy peace 
and order were found amidst woods and desolate moun- 
tains, on the banks of placid lakes as well as on soli- 
tary rocks in the ocean; ages of sanctity which wit- 
nessed a Bede, an Alcuin, a Bernard, a Francis, and 
crowds who followed them as they did Christ; ages of 
vast and beneficent intelligence, in which it pleased the 
Holy Spirit to display the power of the seven gifts, 
in the life of an Anselm, a Thomas of Aquinum, and 
the saintly flock whose steps a cloister guarded; ages 
of the highest civil virtue; which gave birth to the 
laws and institutions of an Edward, a Lewis, a Suger; 
ages of the noblest art which beheld a Giotto, a Michael 
Angelo, a Raffaelo, a Dominichino; ages of poetry, 
which heard an Avitus, a Caedmon, a Dante, a Shakes- 
peare, a Calderon; ages of more than mortal heroism, 



KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 23 

which produced a Tancred and a Godfrey; ages of 
majesty, which knew a Charlemagne, an Alfred, and 
the sainted youth who bore the lily ; ages, too, of Eng- 
land's glory, when she appears not even excluding a 
comparison with the eastern empire, as the most truly 
civilized country on the globe; when the Sovereign of 
the greater portion of the western world applied to 
her schools for instructors; when she sends forth her 
saints to evangelise the nations of the north, and to 
diffuse spiritual treasure over the whole world; when 
heroes flock to her courts to behold the models of re- 
proachless chivalry, and Emperors leave their thrones 
to adore God at the tombs of her martyrs !" 

Here, then, was the perfect civilization, the Kingdom 
of God, for which Digby yearned. Through the scores 
of chapters which follow he brings a wealth of testi- 
mony to establish every statement in his theme: the 
activities of the Church, monastic life, building, mis- 
sionary spirit, the effort for peace, the serene contem- 
plativeness of philosophy and religion, are examined; 
the State gives forth the secrets of its administration 
over the poor and its concern for justice and charity 
to all ; private life makes known its beauties, its aspira- 
tions, and its joys, with here and there an allusion to 
the misfortunes from which human toil can never be 
free. Majestic voices repeat the guiding words of 
Christendom, and the richest revelry is held at the 
courts of worthy kings. Very rarely does the author 
grow controversial, and then the combat is waged 
sadly, gently, with that modern spirit which has rifled 
the temples, which is so secure in its pride and posses- 
sion, and so hollow in its faith. Throughout Digby's 
familiarity with ancient and modern literature and his 



24 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

historical erudition are surprising. "Mores Catholici" 
is like a review of an abbey library made by a scholarly 
saint to appease the hunger of wandering minds, or 
like a series of quaint windows, less brilliant than 
comforting, in which the artisan has written in allegory 
the story of the conquest of the Cross. 

Kenelm Digby, however, became an historian only 
because he was a deeply religious thinker. Because he 
had found peace of heart in his studies, he somewhat 
naively imagined that others would adopt the princi- 
ples of his belief if he told them what he had learned. 
Those principles are continually bobbing up in his work 
because they are the knots which tie his fleeting strands 
of fact together. The reader of "Mores Catholici" — 
a rare person whose acquaintance is to be cultivated — 
will have met with them often enough. It is best to look 
for them, however, in those books "whose study would 
delight the angels," as Ambrose Phillips de Lisle said, 
"The Broad Stone of Honour." Here the youthful, 
enthusiastic Digby wrote himself out in generous pages 
that glow with the anguish of lost chivalry, that are 
sweet and tearful as the memories of a long and cleanly 
love. "I shall but suggest things in imperfect sounds," 
he says modestly, with his heart set on "images of 
quiet wisdom, sanctity, and innocence: symbols of in- 
finite love, of divine and everlasting peace, the daily 
sacrifice, the evening hymn, the sweet music of the pil- 
grim's litanee, the portals that open to receive the living 
to joy, and the dirge of requiem to supplicate rest and 
deliverance for the dead." Ancient chivalry was the 
realization of everything for which his soul yearned; 
it was kind to the lowly, for the Church had said, 
Beati pauperes; it obeyed "from the bottom of the 






KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 25 

heart, like a child"; it cultivated friendship, "that 
musical, poetic, religious word"; its courage was the 
self-sacrifice of the strong; and its hope was in God. 
It held the secret of eternal youth, for "how can he 
grow old who lives separated from all that is destined 
to decay, who unceasingly beholds the same bright 
altars and angelic forms which proclaim his own eter- 
nity?" Loyalty was the soul of knighthood, and Digby 
was intensely, almost desperately, loyal; he was one in 
spirit with Thomas More. 

"The Broad Stone of Honour" is divided into four 
books : Godf ridus lays down general views of chivalry, 
and says some thoughtful things about the art of gov- 
ernment; Tancred considers the religion and discipline 
that prevailed during the Middle Ages ; Morus answers 
the objections which modern thinkers have raised 
against the practice of knighthood; the last book, Or- 
landus, best and most interesting of all, presents a "de- 
tailed view of the virtues of chivalrous character, when 
it is submitted to the genuine and all-powerful influence 
of the Catholic faith." In a general way, Digby tried 
humbly to show that the Church of Christ, moulding 
the hearts of men, had given them a safe sanctuary 
from the blandishments and delusions of a pagan world. 
His philosophy was derived from the practice of a sim- 
ple man ; there is in it no subtlety, no "higher criticism, 
no Germanic phraseology. These things would prob- 
ably have perplexed him if he had thought it worth 
his while to consider them at all. 

The aching void in his soul had been filled with 
heavenly truth, and in the practice of kindly virtue he 
beheld the shining destiny of man. With Saint Au- 
gustine he was ready to say, "I am an old man and a 



26 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Bishop, but I am ready to be taught by a child"; but 
he would probably have gone to sleep under a modern 
professor. In a later book, "Compitum," Digby under- 
took to establish the difficult thesis that "all roads lead 
to Rome." His road of Children, of Youth, of Travel- 
ers, is easy enough to follow if one has already begun 
the journey, but he was a poor apostle to those who are 
hindered by intellectual difficulties. He went along 
ancient paths of glory by the light of regal if aban- 
doned stars, and was just as unable to lead the modern 
spirit as he was half-unconsciously uninfluenced by it. 
Noble treasurer of the words of God, he dwelt in a 
splendid citadel where those who follow him will find 
that "an angel has been charged to speak such words 
to men." 

The human, the lovable quality that softens the some- 
what unearthly erudition of Digby is his inimitable 
dreaming. How constantly, fervently, he seems to have 
anticipated the beatific vision! Going through life in 
the company of an imagination crowded with pictures 
of a hallowed era, he lived in it as completely and genu- 
inely as a sailor lives in his boat. It was useless to 
tempt him with speculation, science, or gold, while he 
felt under his feet the strong bulwarks against the 
waves of the world. "From the disciple who believed 
because he saw Our Saviour under a fig-tree," remarks 
Orlandus, "to the latest examples of men who have 
been added to the Church, speculation and knowledge 
seem to have been little employed in the work of con- 
version; it has been accomplished by very different 
means, the meeting of an old man on the seashore, the 
answer of a child, or a dream." And in Digby's in- 
stance it was the last : a dream of sacred Faith master- 



KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OE THE PAST 27 

ing the bloody arena and the tomb; of majestic and 
solemn temples alive with universal yearning for the 
joys of heaven, and simple happiness in the beauty of 
the world; of nature, itself a mighty cathedral alive 
with multitudinous images aglow with the lavish colour 
of God; and of man himself, ennobled and purified by 
no mechanical process of "Evolution," but by the 
stirring advance of his will to the battle-drums of 
Saints. 

Digby lived a religious existence which some people 
find it impossible to understand. Only to those who 
know the supreme loveliness of the road to perfection, 
where childlike eyes are fixed on the merciful counte- 
nance of a divine Redeemer, will it seem natural and 
worth while. The lofty mission of the Church, to heal* 
the wounds of society with inspired law and to crown 
the humblest life with the sacramental kiss, was for 
the author of "The Broad Stone of Honour" the only 
consoling reality. He saw a thousand cloisters that 
had long been razed, heard multitudes of dead Saints 
chant the Benedicite, and encountered legions of 
knights whose phantom shields bore the device of eter- 
nal honour. Splendid Christian! And for him, too, 
at the sight of the desolation around him, there was re- 
served that sacred melancholy which is loved in heaven 
because Jesus Himself had suffered it on the walls of 
Jerusalem. 

Let us not get the impression, however, that he lived 
always among ruins. For Digby the Spirit of God 
was a dulce refrigerium, a source of joy if not of hearty 
laughter. He loved the minstrelsy, the merry-making, 
and the hospitality of the olden time quite as much as 
the dizzy road to heaven. All his books breathe the 



28 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tranquillity of calm human relationships, joy in nature, 
and fondness for domestic life. In some of his minor 
works, like "Evenings on the Thames," "The Chil- 
dren's Bower," and "The Lover's Seat" he tried to show 
how life could be made a graceful love story with a 
happy ending, rather than a tale told by an idiot. 
Digby explains that he seeks "the subtle essence of 
happiness, which is not to be found in recondite or 
exclusive activities but in common things." Like 
Wordsworth, he had followed Plato in his affection 
for the simplicity of nature. Not so many persons in 
these harrowed days of ours would, one must suppose, 
find his reflections on English country life interest- 
ing. Digby had little dramatic or even narrative in- 
stinct ; at his best he possesses the fine, pensive quality 
of Walton, but at his worst he is almost stupidly 
pedantic. What he lacked for success in the discursive 
familiar essay was variety, lightness, that ounce of wit 
which makes the literary porridge savoury. He could 
not draw his mind from the enchantment of the past. 
"As one who beholds a beautiful picture," he says, 
"gazes till he ardently wishes to see it move ... so 
every one who contemplates the noble images of re- 
proachless chivalry must feel anxious that they be re- 
vived in the deeds of men." This was the sole concern 
of his long and devoted life. 

Another charming characteristic of Digby's charac- 
ter was his intense delight in travel. During the course 
of his wanderings he must have seen most of the ro- 
mantic spots in England and on the Continent. He 
speaks very rarely of large cities, and if an occasional 
notice of one is taken, he generally adds a phrase to 
indicate his disapprobation of its modern features. 



KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 29 

Somewhere he even upbraids Doctor Johnson for hav- 
ing expressed a fondness for London. In the country, 
however, among either the wild beauties of nature or the 
remains of the ancient civilization, Digby is the ideal 
traveler, divining the inner radiance of the one or re- 
fashioning the other according to the legend of its 
antique glory. How appealing is his happiness when 
permitted to look upon some ruined monastery, castle, 
or shrine, whose renown was once as great as its present 
neglect! "On the high Alp of the Surinam Pass," he 
relates, "I found a little chapel with a bell . . . time 
would fail me to describe . . . the dark, fearful walls 
of Lusignan, near Poitiers ; the wonderful architecture 
of the curious gates and Oriental halls of Granada, 
its courts of the lions emblazoned with the symbols of 
Mohammedan superstitions; the beautiful embattled 
heights of Johannisberg ; the deep pool and gloomy 
towers of Bingen, and Lichtenstein with the sun setting 
over the Danube." There was a place for every mood. 
"The Broad Stone of Honour" was inspired largely 
by a visit to Ehrenbreitenstein, mighty symbol to 
Digby of so much glory that had gone. It begins with 
a revel in nature. "We walked on a spring morning 
through the delicious groves that clothe the mountains 
of Dauphiny which surround the old castle of the family 
of Bayard" — and ends, or very nearly, with Peters- 
borough, "rising out of the water like a pile of grotto 
work." In "Mores Catholici" there is a characteristic- 
ally humble confession: "For my part, if I had never 
seen Altenrive or Vallombrosa, Camaldoli or St. Urban, 
the beauties of our loveliest scenery would not delight 
me as they now can do. I should see them with quite 
different eyes. The walls would not inspire any bright 



30 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

consoling recollections, nor the deep forests, peace." 
This present world was for Digby only a keyboard 
from which he could draw at will "the giant melodies 
of the past." Sometimes there is an outcry of pain, 
never savage as in Heine, or rhetorically melancholic 
as in Burke or Chateaubriand, but quaintly plaintive; 
a child might have sorrowed thus for his mother. "How 
many noble ruins, memories of the Gallic fury, have I 
met in places that one might have thought far too 
sequestered for its force to reach," he says ; and again, 
"Modern poetry has only one sound, 'like the wind 
through a ruin'd cell.' " 

Such are the marvelously beautiful though forgotten 
books of the gentlest modern man who has followed 
Christian knighthood. Kenelm Digby gave himself 
more fully than even Sir Walter Scott to the romantic 
vision; but he was less of a Don Quixote because he 
took the Faith. Middle Age life was not for him 
a mere matter of gorgeous plumes and pink-cheeked 
damsels, but also of the cloister and the poor, above 
all of the soul. One cannot but feel that he preserved 
to the day of his death those "clouds of glory" in 
which he was born. It may be quite true that he was 
somewhat unpractical and that his knowledge of money 
and banking was decidedly limited; but Barney New- 
come was superior in this respect to the Colonel. If 
in the years that come Digby's golden books shall by 
some cruel alchemy be turned to dust, or rouse only a 
faint gleam in the eyes of collectors, his character and 
eagerness to serve must stand in mute testimony to 
a Faith by which the world was once redeemed. It 
was "for the real manna" that he grew mighty in 
learning. His humility would have asked no larger 






KENELM DIGBY AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE PAST 31 

reward than that somewhere a youth reading one of his 
books should be stirred by the breath of the Past, 
or that some quiet thinker, turning the pages of "Mores 
Catholici" should have been reminded of the grandeur 
that was God's. 

It would be a grave mistake, however, to believe that 
the effort of Kenelm Digby was entirely without fruit. 
His books, as Canon Barry observes, have taught 
teachers, who, like Julius Hare, have found in them 
priceless counsel. Wordsworth drew inspiration for a 
sonnet from "The Broad Stone of Honour," and Rus- 
kin owed to it some of the artistic idealism which de- 
termined his career. Indeed, the author of "Modern 
Painters" confessed even another debt. 1 "The reader 
will find . . . every phase of nobleness illustrated in 
Kenelm Digby 's 'Broad Stone of Honour.' The best 
help I have ever had — so far as help depended on the 
praise and sympathy of others in work — was given me 
when this author, from whom I first learned to love 
nobleness, introduced frequent references to my own 
writings in his 'Children's Bower.' " That is sufficient 
praise; but surely there are hundreds of less famous 
men whose lives have been enriched and whose steps 
have been guided by his labour. 

Digby, the unforgettable, the magnificent dreamer! 
What better tribute could be paid to his memory than 
the epilogue which he himself affixed to the work of his 
youth : 

"0 that the poet were not just in saying, that this 
is now an age of selfish men, that life is drest for a 
shew, while the great events which old story rings seem 

1 Vol. IX, 361. 



32 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

vain and hollow. O that some voice may raise us up 
again and give us virtue, that avarice and expense may 
be no more adored, but plain living and high thinking 
be again our glory. Had these rude and faint images 
of a faithful age been drawn by one who had indeed 
caught its simple spirit, he would not have let you 
depart without praying that you, who have followed 
him from the beginning to the ending would be pleased 
in charity to put him, who would rejoice to serve you, 
into your devout memento; that Almighty God might 
send him good deliverance while he was alive, and 
when he was dead and his body laid to the cold earth, 
when the darkness of age and death should have cov- 
ered over both this book and him, through God's grace, 
his soule might enter Paradise. He would have prayed 
you all, if you heard never more of him, to pray for 
his soule." 

BOOK NOTE 

The works of Kenelm Digby are very difficult to obtain. Those 
of outstanding importance are "Mores Catholici," several times 
reprinted, "The Broad Stone of Honour," the last volume of which 
(Orlandus) has not, to my knowledge, been reissued since 1829, 
and "Compitum." "Evenings on the Thames" is worth looking 
into. Digby's verse, of which there is a great deal, is impossibly 
tedious. His erudition had ironed life out of any quatrains he 
might possibly make. The fine "Memoir of Kenelm Digby," by 
Bernard Holland, called forth several essays in review, the most 
noteworthy of which are those by William Barry in the Dublin 
Review, by Henry Lappin in the Catholic World, and by Paul E. 
More in the Unpartizan Review. All of these appeared during 
1920. 



CHAPTER THREE 

THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 

"I also in all things please all men, not seeking that which is 
profitable to myself, but to many, that they may be saved." 

Saint Paul. 

THE upheaval of the sixteenth century bequeathed 
to the world that would embattle the Catholic 
Spirit a two-edged sword: one, the humanistic 
elevation of nature and consequent debasement of the 
supernatural; the other, the astringent, menacingly 
ascetic outlook of the Puritan. It was against the 
second of these that Kenelm Digby, poetic and eruditely 
romantic, lifted an unwieldy voice, even though the 
matter he dealt with was the comparatively definite 
and simple life of the past. Then there arose from 
the midst of the thinkers of Protestant England a man 
whose powers were resolutely devoted to conquering 
the first enemy and the future it seemed destined to 
rule; who would read the scrolls of the final atheistic 
laughter at God and write over them a palimpsest of 
Christian confidence ; who would attempt to fathom the 
dark and complex soul of all time and set down his 
findings with the clearness of a logbook. Again, as the 
human embryo is said to mirror the growth of the race, 
so John Henry Newman, triumphing over modern 
thought by the victory gained within himself, has 

33 



34 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

seemed to many a symbol of the intellectual develop- 
ment through which religiously unsettled moderns may 
have to pass. 

There is little reason why we should insist here upon 
the greatness of Newman's influence. A dozen gifted 
minds have confirmed Disraeli's opinion that he was 
the most powerful religious thinker to appear in Eng- 
land during several centuries ; and we have only to 
consider the amazing betterment in the position of 
English Catholicism during the last generation to real- 
ize how much, even in an outward way, was accom- 
plished by the man who stirred Oxford. Everyone ad- 
mits that he possessed a remarkable mind and quite 
unusual gifts of expression, but the world has rightly 
placed above even these the vigour of his personality. 
That is almost as firmly established a tradition as the 
genius of Napoleon. The elite of England were moved 
by the fervour and glory of his creed. Wherever he 
passed in that springtime of the Catholic revival, faith 
sprang up from the wayside ; he was the sower of God, 
upon whom was the seal of election. Later, however, 
there came a time when his effectiveness seemed to have 
vanished, when his subtle, indefatigably cautious the- 
ology was doomed to be thought half-hearted allegiance 
by men at the controversial front, when his heart was 
wrung by denunciation, by sheer failure, until it seemed 
of little use in the world. The very triumphs of his 
later years were bloody from his wounds. The delicate 
steel of his own sensibility pierced him through. 

But, whether men followed or opposed or silenced 
him, it was never forgotten that he was a religious 
teacher of tremendous significance. The active man 
might chafe at Newman's inaction; the pedant might 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 35 

try to make of him the kind of clever artist that he 
could understand; the short-sighted might accuse him 
of error or dishonesty ; still, no one ever denied that he 
was, uniquely, Newman. A kind of marvelous whole- 
ness distinguished his character and thought, a white 
light to be captured by no prism. The single apostolic 
purpose of his mission is evident from first to last, 
but the points at which it touches life are multitudinous 
and astonishingly varied. He considered existence 
from more points of view than any of the great Vic- 
torian novelists had known, but he never forgot the 
purpose of his examination. One feels in reading New- 
man that one's personal intellectual discoveries have 
been anticipated, that the Cardinal has been every- 
where in spiritual geography, although he seems quietly 
to take it for granted that he should have been there 
and so to make nothing of it. In a sense, he is like 
a masterful major-domo, possessing the keys to all 
the chambers of the soul, even the darkest of which he 
has explored and aired and lighted up with a touch 
that betrays his watchful presence. 

The universality of his mind's action images the 
scope of his personality. Newman's character is a 
mysterious blend of extraordinary qualities: to the 
study of experience he brought the rarest energy both 
of analysis and deduction; solitary, sensitive, mystic- 
ally conscious of the scrutiny of God, he nevertheless 
read the souls about him with the same surety which 
distinguished his examination of himself; contempla- 
tive by nature, he still coveted, needed, action. His 
eye, glorying in the beauty of the world, was fixed 
sternly on its deepest, most ascetic, cravings. There 
is a sense in which Newman's appearance seems, also, 



36 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a complement of his inner nature: no one ever looked 
more like a dignified old lady and no one was ever more 
of a man. Remember the "head of Caesar" that Froude 
speaks of; the preacher at St. Mary's, Oxford; the 
stillness that followed his retirement, of which Dr. 
Shairp says, "It was as when, to one kneeling by night, 
in the silence of some vast cathedral, the great bell 
tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly gone still" ; the 
pilgrim, going to St. Peter's in Rome, barefoot, pray- 
ing for guidance, with deep furrows tightening their 
grip on his countenance ; the Oratorian priest, secluded 
in the obscurity of Birmingham, teaching boys to enact 
Terence and himself to be patient ; the Cardinal, finally, 
his aged face plaintive above the magnificence of the 
purple garments. Remember these things and as many 
more if you would read Newman correctly. 

John Henry Newman was born in London on Feb- 
ruary 21, 1801, of a London banker whose wife traced 
descent from Huguenot emigres. There was nothing to 
distinguish the family from the Victorian middle-class 
to which it belonged, excepting, perhaps, certain rather 
uncommon intellectual concerns. The life about them 
was tranquil and reticent, governed by the restraints, 
the conventions, and the practical virtues which charac- 
terized a society the individual members of which were 
more than a little eccentric, relatively unsocial. Reli- 
gion was very far from being a dominant interest and, 
but for their diligent reading of the King James Ver- 
sion, men would have come near forgetting all about 
their souls. "He was a very philosophical young gentle- 
man" is his sister's description of Newman at the age 
of eleven. "Philosophical" meant extraordinary reti- 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 37 

cence, gentleness, aversion to the rougher games, quick 
sensibility, and a taste for dreamy thinking. "Un- 
known influences" and "magic powers" interested him, 
and it is not strange that at fifteen he experienced a 
Calvinistic conversion from which he drew and re- 
tained the idea that "there are two and two only 
absolute and luminously self-evident beings — myself 
and my Creator." 

Depth of religious experience in the soul of a youth 
inordinately gifted is not unusual, but with Newman 
eagerness of mind overcame a dangerous egoism and 
dispelled the quietism of reverie. He could not help see- 
ing the world, being interested in the world. His curi- 
osity was skeptical, interrogative ; and for a time he 
sought the response to his query in Gibbon and Locke. 
Nor had his religious instability vanished when, at Ox- 
ford, he turned from the study of law to enter orders, 
and when he was, on a memorable day in 1822, elected 
Fellow of Oriel College. The young Newman possessed 
all the reflectiveness, the sincerity, and the gaucherie of 
a great spirit rising out of an environment where it 
has not been at home. It was Whately, the massive, 
somewhat worldly logician, who first recognized the 
talent of this forbiddingly introspective youth; it was 
Whately who, addressing Newman as an equal, won a 
temporary disciple for liberalism. Nevertheless, fasci- 
nated though he might be with the dialectic of his 
master, Newman had now come into contact with the 
world, and his omnivorous intellect was never any 
longer at rest. More and more deeply conscious of the 
Spirit of God, confident of a destiny, he set out on the 
tireless search for Truth. 

The growing mind of Newman proved unusually re- 



38 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ceptive and at the same time daringly original in the 
use it made of discoveries. No experience stirred him 
more deeply, perhaps, than the death of a favorite 
sister ; he began to consider the material world illusory, 
to look for spiritual realities veiled by externals, in 
short, to read vastly more of Plato into his somewhat 
arid Christianity. With this there came naturally a 
new interest in the significance of personality. He be- 
gan to feel strongly the power of love, and the circle of 
friends that formed at Oxford answered his appeal. 
First among these was Hurrell Froude, a fervent 
youngster who, like Digby, had drunk the wine of the 
Catholic Ages and sensed the feebleness of the prevail- 
ing creed, though his life was doomed to end before he 
had reached the goal. Then there was John Keble, at 
the height of his influence as a spiritual leader and re- 
nowned for the authorship of "The Christian Year." 
Keble's character was amiable and so was his religion, 
fed as it had been on the poetry of the older Anglican 
divines. To the warmth of this atmosphere, vibrant 
with enthusiasm, with the romantic aspiration for more 
generous beliefs, Newman's heart opened. It was clear 
that a part of Oxford, at least, had caught echoes of 
Chateaubriand and Walter Scott ; and the ancient walls 
which had enshrined the scholars of Catholic England 
began once more to drink in whispers of Christendom. 
But this coterie of men was far too sincere for dilet- 
tantism. Gradually their concerns left the domain of 
the purely speculative and turned practical: they felt 
a keen interest in the life of the primitive Church, 
where belief and action had obviously been less formal 
and intensely more vital than they were in modern 
England. What, at this particular stage of his life's 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 39 

journey, were the actual aims of Newman? He was 
no longer the mere philosopher, absorbed in the idea 
of the creature's apprehension of the Creator, but a 
man who had discovered the immeasurable realities of 
love. Existence had become for him an urge to find 
God in the world, to seek the body of doctrine and 
symbol in which the Spirit had been expressed. New- 
man the idealist had passed ; Newman the liberal realist 
had been a transitory figure. Envisaging the realm 
of his own thought, weighing with the most resolute 
sincerity the worth of his own convictions, he now 
began to penetrate the minds of others, especially of 
those to whom religion made no marked appeal. Con- 
scious for the first time of a mission to teach, he in- 
stinctively adopted the invaluable method of example. 
"Know thyself" and "Know others" were twin and 
constant stars. The power of the Oxford sermons, to 
which men listened with bated breath, lay in the utter 
sincerity of the preacher's experience, thinking, and 
emotion. England had heard no such speech for cen- 
turies. 

These Oxford sermons were the result of one of those 
recurrent crises in Newman's life, in which his essen- 
tially contemplative mind encountered the shock of the 
outer world. He had come to realize the necessary 
existence of the Christian Church as the custodian 
of the spiritual life bequeathed by the Saviour, and to 
see that his countrymen were totally indifferent to 
purity of doctrine and freedom of action in that 
Church. Rather naively, he fancied that the return 
of the Anglican Communion to the belief and practice 
of the Fathers of the Church could be accomplished by 
means of certain definite reforms. Then, gradually, 



40 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

he awoke to the difficulties of the situation and to the 
poverty of his own knowledge. What were the reasons 
for believing? What had the Fathers taught? How 
had the Church of England become the inheritor of that 
teaching? Nothing could lessen the burning eagerness 
of Newman to answer these questions. In his effort 
to discover the reality of the Apostolic Church, he un- 
dertook tedious researches into the history of the 
Arians. The total indifference of his mind to affairs 
alien to this great spiritual quest is interestingly re- 
vealed in a letter written at the time in response to a 
gentleman who wished Newman to address a popular 
gathering. Loftily though kindly, he states that he has 
nothing to say on the subject proposed, being "engaged 
on a history of the Arians.'' In reality the interests of 
his life were world-wide, but he never compromised with 
his mission. 

The time had come, however, when Newman's earnest 
apologetics could no longer avoid the reality of Rome. 
History revealed the continuous energy of the Papacy, 
and Continental thought never overlooked the impor- 
tance of its modern position. But he had been born 
into the Church of England, had imbibed anti-Roman 
views with mother's milk, and had learned to love the 
sweetness and majesty of those early Anglican divines 
who had never doubted the apostolic character of their 
creed. And, therefore, while Newman might make in- 
creasingly larger concessions, he would not cease to 
repudiate the dominion of the Popes. At this time 
an important, seemingly Providential change in his 
environment considerably modified his views. Having 
endangered his health by too much study, Newman set 
out with Froude on a cruise of the Mediterranean. 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 41 

Catholic life impressed him very deeply: the cities he 
visited, the services he attended, the people he met, 
gave him a view of things that he had never before en- 
compassed. Nevertheless, his convictions stood firm 
against Rome, and he was shocked by what he be- 
lieved superstition, as well as hurt, in his Victorian 
propriety, by the somewhat wanton relics of Renais- 
sance art. The best he could do was to cry out upon 
leaving, "O, that thy creed were sound!" Returning 
to England he felt surer than ever of his mission, more 
aware of the "Kindly Light" that would lead him on- 
ward. 

It was characteristic of Newman until the end not 
to understand the conservatism that safeguards insti- 
tutional life. No one was ever less of an egoist, and yet 
few men have been more absolutely individualistic. His 
beliefs and practices were those which he found satis- 
factory in the light of his own experience; and the 
service that he yearned for was to render easy for 
others the way to the splendour and peace of God as 
vouchsafed to him. And thus, while many Oxford men 
drew close to his doctrine, and the phrase "Credo in 
Newmanrmm" came to represent a definite creed, the 
vast machinery of the Church of England showed no 
unsteadiness. Bishops, indeed, muttered a rather in- 
distinct disapproval of the "Romanizing tendencies" 
manifest at Oxford; certain vicars in distant country 
parishes responded eagerly to the fervour of Oriel 
College; but the great mass of Englishmen viewed the 
matter with stolid unconcern. There was, men said, a 
vague movement on foot within the Church; but it 
seemed very provincial, quite harmless. And then, 
suddenly, the peace was broken by Keble's sermon on 



42 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

"National Apostasy," which castigated the outspoken 
meddling of the State in the affairs of the Church, the 
issue being the suppression for political reasons of 
certain sees in Ireland. The spokesman received quick 
and courageous support. Newman was ready for 
battle now, and launched from the pulpit at St. Mary's 
a series of trenchant sermons that analyzed the depths 
of Christian doctrine, while the light of his own per- 
sonality seemed to the intent audience a votive lamp 
given wholly to Truth. Disciples gathered, men lis- 
tened in spite of themselves, and what had seemed only a 
theory suddenly lived in practice. Nevertheless, the 
energy of Newman did not rest here: the weapon of 
literature was at hand, and on September 9, 1833, he 
launched the first number of "Tracts for the Times." 

Did he realize the significance of this undertaking? 
Probably not. An apostle now, conscious of divine 
leadership, he yearned and laboured solely for the 
renovation of the English Church. The tracts took 
up one by one the practices of Apostolic Christianity, 
and attacked vehemently the liberalism of most Angli- 
cans. Keble, even Pusey — the authoritative and impos- 
ing theologian — wrote arresting discussions, but New- 
man remained the leader upon whom the destinies of 
the combat depended. He had not reckoned, however, 
with either of two things: the actual organization and 
character of the Church to which he belonged, or the 
possibility that he had not yet discovered the reality 
which he sought — the living, concrete institution which 
represented upon earth the majesty of God. The para- 
dox upon which the Tractarian movement was based — 
though its leaders did not view it as a paradox — was 
that Rome, though it had best conserved the tradi- 



THE PERSONALITY OP NEWMAN 43 

tions of the Apostolic Church, was hopelessly wrong, 
and that Anglicanism, which had forgotten those 
traditions, was altogether right. Newman, wholly ab- 
sorbed in the battle within himself for more light and 
the outer battle of the apostle against the world, became 
aware only gradually of this radical difficulty. At first 
he solved it to his satisfaction by proposing a via 
media, but events occurring in rapid succession proved 
to his dismay that the via media was only an illusion. 
There was the article by Wiseman on the Donatists, 
showing that the Anglicans are perilously like those 
unfortunate and forgotten heretics ; there was the con- 
stant testimony of history to the deference with which 
the Fathers had looked upon the Papal authority ; and 
finally the weight of the Anglican organization made it- 
self felt in a series of heavy blows. Tract 90, inter- 
preting the Thirty-nine Articles of the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer in a Catholic sense, was discountenanced by 
the Bishops ; ecclesiastical sees were created for purely 
political reasons ; William George Ward was con- 
demned for his book, "The Ideal of the Christian 
Church"; and charges of heresy and treason were lev- 
eled against the Tractarians as a body. Before the 
overwhelming evidence against the paradox which he 
now saw quite clearly, Newman yielded. He could 
preach at Oxford no longer, he had built his house on 
sand. 

Littlemore, the retreat prepared during the splen- 
dour of his spiritual leadership, became his refuge in 
the hour of pain. There remained one great problem 
to solve, and, entering into semi-monastic retirement 
with a few friends, he set about the task resolutely, 
patiently, humbly. What is the visible power, the or- 



44 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ganization, to which divine Revelation has been con- 
fided? Is this a purely formal custodian, something" 
like a manuscript library with a group of commenta- 
tors, or is it a vital institution, almost a person, in 
which breathes the Presence of the Spirit of God? 
Newman had been seeking for years, somewhat uncon- 
sciously, the answer to this problem, but it had now 
become the sole concern of his life. The solution at 
which he arrived is "The Development of Christian 
Doctrine," a strikingly original discovery, and the su- 
preme product, in all likelihood, of his thought. Time 
and effort were needed to abate his difficulties, to clear 
away his doubts, and to overcome his prejudices against 
Rome. But the angel of God had not stirred the waters 
in vain ; quite suddenly he halted his pen at the end of 
the beautiful epilogue to the "Essay on Development," 
and then wrote the words, "Nunc dimittis servum tuum, 
Domine, secundum verbum tuum m pace, quia viderunt 
oculi mei salutare tuum." On October 8, 1845, New- 
man was received into the Catholic Church by Father 
Dominic of the Passionists, and some time later was 
confirmed by Wiseman, who had carefully noted the 
progress of the movement from the beginning. What 
it had cost this convert to break from fond associations, 
from tried and beloved friends like Keble and Pusey, 
and from the church to which his strong early man- 
hood had sworn the noblest allegiance, has left no fur- 
row on the hard face of time; but when one walks 
through the altered Littlemore of today, or seeks out 
at Oxford the ways that Newman went, one remembers, 
as something great and sorrowful, the legend of his 
anguish and tears. 

Even when due allowance for the restraints of affec- 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 45 

tion has been made, it must be admitted that Newman's 
spiritual development was very slow. At the close of 
the forty-fifth year of his life, he stood on the threshold 
of an utterly new departure, however thoroughly his 
philosophy may have been formed. Nevertheless, al- 
though his powers of thought and concentration were 
most unusual, the hesitancy with which he reached con- 
clusions was the natural result of his genius. This is 
beyond analysis, but its tangible characteristics are 
noteworthy. While he was fundamentally a mystic, a 
contemplative, who could have found under ordinary 
circumstances sufficient engrossment in the relation 
between his spirit and its Ultimate Destiny, Newman 
still, on the other hand, when once aroused to the actual, 
the real, tried to find in it everywhere the footprints 
of his ideal. The surprising many-sidedness of his 
gaze, the faculty for viewing things not as generalities 
but as collections of individuals, made him alive to al- 
most numberless points of view, difficulties, lacunas, 
and above all wilful sidesteppings of action. To make 
the individual realize the individuality of objective 
truth (or, as philosophers would say, to coordinate the 
one and the many) and act upon it, became the mission 
into which he threw all his powers. It needed the crisis 
of battle with the conventions and prejudices of sur- 
rounding society to call forth the full creative energy 
of Newman and to develop the flare of his intuition. 
And thus the Oxford Movement drew out a great share 
of his best work and enabled him, not indeed to over- 
come the organization with which he fought, but to 
escape from it unto Truth. 

On May 30, 1847* Newman was ordained a priest, 
and shortly after resolved to establish an English 



46 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

oratory under a modification of St. Philip Neri*s rule. 
Thus he came under the patronage of the simple and 
kindly saint, the worth of whose example he was to 
feel throughout life. The Birmingham Oratory was 
opened in 1848, under bright and promising conditions, 
though Newman himself felt old and weary, rather 
strangely at ease in comparison with the rich activity 
of his Oxford years. Henceforth his life would be 
concerned with many things, but the broad principles of 
his mental action would remain the same. His object 
was still the arousal, the conversion, of the individual ; 
opposition would come, as always, from the organiza- 
tion to which he had belonged. Newman, though con- 
servative, was utterly indifferent to conventions: he 
could see no worth in words from which the living, 
energizing thought had departed. Now during those 
years of the nineteenth century the theological defense 
of the Church was virtually a stubbornly armed resist- 
ance. The Catholic Spirit, resolutely entrenched be- 
hind traditional apologetics and philosophy, beheld 
with dismay the rise of a multitude of heretical opin- 
ions, of revolutionary teachings, of naturalist dogmas, 
which were the harvest of the great humanistic revolts 
that had broken out in succession since the fifteenth 
century. New views were, therefore, scrutinized rigor- 
ously, and Roman theologians took on much of the 
character of military police, inclined to treat roughly 
any apparition not obviously orthodox. This state of 
affairs was brought home to Newman by the misunder- 
standing that greeted certain passages in the "Essay 
on Development." He was to encounter it again and 
again: the sternness of a struggle in which no quarter 
was given scarcely respected the sensitiveness of a mind 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 47 

that moved always above the battle. There was, how- 
ever, an all-important difference between his attitude 
as a Catholic and his Anglican position. However 
much he might resent the curbing of his influence, the 
blindness of officials, or the constraints imposed by a 
too anxious authority, he never swerved in his allegiance 
or in his confidence that the difficulty would, in the 
end, be adjusted. In fact, these recurrent brushes 
with the outposts of the Catholic Spirit were really 
tocsins that summoned the best of his powers, tocsins 
to which he responded with the valour and self-sacri- 
fice of a hero. 

At no time in Newman's life did the fine mettle of 
his character prove itself more genuine than during 
the early days of his priesthood. Giving himself ut- 
terly to that missionary work he could do so well, and 
no less wholly to the needs of his young community, he 
strengthened himself also with meditation and prayer. 
The "Sermons to Mixed Congregations" and "Ser- 
mons Preached on Various Occasions," wherein the 
style grows steadily more eloquent and more serene, 
give an outward stamp to the satisfaction he drew 
from religion. Then the Gorham Case, a celebrated 
instance in which the authority of the English bishops 
had been brusquely ignored by the Privy Council, hav- 
ing provided the opportunity, he attacked Anglican- 
ism directly in the ringing, unusually outspoken lec- 
tures which have since been entitled, "On the Difficul- 
ties of Anglicans." These were followed by some of his 
very best oratorical efforts, the addresses "On the 
Present Position of Catholics," which did much to 
quell the "No-Popery" outbursts, so easy to stimu- 
late in a populace that does not understand. All of 



48 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

this controversial work is brilliant, witty, even sat- 
irical, but its chief distinction is the admirable defer- 
ence with which Newman the convert treats the con- 
victions of those who were once his brethren. He does 
not mince matters, but he meets deftly and lovingly 
those whom he has abandoned, holding even that the 
Anglican position is worth while as a bulwark against 
infidelity. Retrospective controversy is always a 
dangerous undertaking, and Newman's genius found 
the exact combination of courtesy and manliness needed 
for the task. 

Naturally enough, he longed constantly for apos- 
tolic labour, for a position which would bring with it 
that vast influence upon souls which he felt able to 
exert. He would not have been human had he for- 
gotten the glory of Oxford ; he would not have been a 
man of God had he been willing to forgo a similar 
opportunity after Catholic truth had been vouchsafed 
him. Suddenly the idea of a Catholic University to be 
erected in Dublin was brought forth by Doctor Cullen, 
with the suggestion that Newman direct the enterprise. 
There seemed to be unlimited opportunities here of the 
sort which, when developed, leave their impress upon 
a whole society; there were also enormous difficulties 
and almost forbidding requirements. It was charac- 
teristic of Newman to see all of these things with ex- 
ceptional clearness and to hope for success. Again he 
followed the light of his mission, trusting because 
"Peter had spoken" and could not have misjudged 
the issue, and again he failed to take into account the 
actual condition of the organization with which he 
would have to deal. Another Englishman would have 
halted upon considering the relations existing between 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 49 

his country and Ireland, but Newman was beyond all 
of that. At the price of intense personal hardship 
he traveled throughout the island, admired the people, 
and expressed unqualifiedly his sympathy with their 
national aspirations. The introductory Dublin lec- 
ture, with its portrait of the amiable sharing of inter- 
ests that had once distinguished England and Ireland, 
was utterly sincere. Unfortunately the University 
was still-born; Cullen proved to be a narrow and offi- 
cious prelate whose views, too small to merit any 
earnest attention, tied Newman hand and foot; many 
who had acclaimed the project most boisterously when 
it was broached showed no practical interest in it as 
a reality: and the impassioned hope, the noble vision, 
of Newman's "Idea of a University" became great lit- 
erature but no school in the concrete. Again the 
organization had triumphed over the serenity of a 
great man's dream, and Newman came back to the 
oratory wasted in health and quite broken in spirit — 
a disillusioned man. 

Failure began to haunt him. The retirement in 
which he now lived was more trying by far than the 
traditional isolation of genius, for it was the result of 
a virtual repudiation of his work and mission, a cast- 
ing out of his thought as well-nigh unclean. Envisag- 
ing the minds of thousands upon thousands of English- 
men, divining their spiritual needs and difficulties with 
impartial realism, he saw with dismay that the ap- 
pointed leaders of Catholic thought were considering 
other matters. His plan to make a new English ver- 
sion of the Scriptures was first encouraged and then 
peremptorily snuffed out. His resolve to aid young 
Catholics at Oxford by establishing a mission there 



50 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was foiled, chiefly through Manning's agency. Finally, 
the position of conciliation which he assumed on the 
question of Papal Infallibility incurred opposition 
both from the belligerent supporters of an absolute 
Papacy — one of whom, W. G. Ward of the Dvhlm 
Review, declared that he should like a new bull each 
morning with his breakfast, — and from liberals who, 
like Capes and Lord Acton, had been influenced by 
Germanic criticism to the point where they very nearly 
denied the traditional authority of Rome. Newman's 
views on the Infallibility and the Temporal Power were 
quite generally misinterpreted, and Rome was led to 
consider him a lukewarm supporter, if not a positive 
enemy. 

There is no room here for an examination of the 
controversy, but it may safely be affirmed that the real 
cause for all these difficulties lay in the contrasted 
temperaments of Newman and Cardinal Manning. 
The Archbishop of Westminster lacked breadth of 
vision and artistic power, but he possessed an energy 
in direction and a diplomatic skill quite military in 
character; scorning what he believed to be speculative 
heckling with all the brusqueness of a soldier, he 
strained every sinew in an effort to dominate the here 
and now. It is interesting to note that time has vin- 
dicated the views of Newman on these subjects which 
Manning frowned upon : our view of Papal Infallibility 
is, practically, Newman's, there is a mission at Oxford, 
and a new version of the Scriptures has been under- 
taken. On the other hand, the genuine service ren- 
dered by Manning is attested to by the soundness of 
his views on labour, his correct appraisal of Church 
administration, and his schemes for popular missionary 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 51 

work — all of them views alien, in their practical as- 
pects, to the mind of Newman. 

So deep was the humiliation of the great Oratorian, 
and so confined was he to the simple duties of a parish 
priest and rector of a boys' academy, that in 1860 
his return to the Anglican Church was announced as 
probable, even imminent. He was, indeed, quite dis- 
couraged, but he put down these reports in a flaming 
letter which did not reveal, of course, the ascetic 
religious life from which he drew strength. Even 
though the sensibility that was interwoven with his 
poet's nature might have been bruised and beaten, 
though his mission to other minds might have been 
hampered, the inner Newman, the contemplative, the 
visionary, the man of religion, remained unaltered. 
II faut sowffrir pour etre beau; and the aging priest, 
crushed by the hostility of his environment, was never 
more kindly, more fervent, more distinctly the seer. 
This was the Newman of the "Meditations," of "The 
Dream of Gerontius," of the myriad letters so instinct 
with sympathy and understanding. It was not, how- 
ever, the creative Newman, master of controversy and 
convincing motive, the Newman who would appear only 
when contact with the outer world was large and free. 

Then, at Christmas time, 1863, Charles Kingsley the 
novelist stated in MacmMcurCs Magazine: "The truth 
for its own sake has never been a virtue with the Roman 
clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not 
be." At first the accused was disposed to view here 
only another petty annoyance, and contented himself 
with a protest. To this Kingsley paid little attention ; 
in fact he issued a vigorous denunciatory pamphlet 
entitled, "What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?" 



52 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

This was plainly not the fruit of personal resentment, 
but aimed at pillorying an example, at making allega- 
tions of dishonesty that would apply to the Catholic 
priesthood as a whole. Newman was aroused to the 
full meaning o£ the issue and resolutely took up the 
cudgels of debate, all the better fitted by reason of his 
long rest. In a celebrated attack he rushed Kingsley 
off his ground and riddled the unfortunate pamphlet 
with something akin to fury. Then, in a number of 
articles written at white heat, where the swift thought 
and virility of emotion give English words an almost 
uncanny vitality, he told the intimate narrative of 
his soul. Kingsley was hopelessly crushed and left to 
stand naked and desolate before public opinion; and 
the universal recognition of Newman's success has 
scarce an equal in the history of controversy. The 
character of the Oxford Movement had been vindi- 
cated forever, and, no matter what opinions men 
might in the future hold concerning the Catholic faith, 
they could not decently or openly accuse its ministers 
of dishonesty. It is worth noting that the victory 
achieved by the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" was purely 
literary ; that for the first time in his career Newman 
had gained a cause without the aid of oratory. This 
was to hold true of all his later work. 

While England accepted joyfully Newman's vindi- 
cation, his relations with extremists among Catholics 
did not become easier. So thorough a lack of prestige 
may have continued to sadden, but did not any longer 
curb him. In 1870 he began another purely literary 
mission, which when completed was called very mod- 
estly "An Essay towards a Grammar of Assent." 
Newman's objective here was a defense of the ultimate 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 53 

grounds for reasonable faith, against which he saw 
more and more clearly that the forces of skepticism 
were beginning to move. His battle is with souls that 
have lost themselves far away from the domain of 
religious belief, who have, in fact, almost forgotten 
what belief is like. Never had his thought, his charity, 
his fervent missionary spirit, gone so far: and in the 
subtle labyrinth of innermost human psychology he 
struggled with the most tenacious and skillful of de- 
mons. The effort of this wrestling cost Newman more 
energy than anything else he had undertaken, but his 
success was immediate and sustained. Everyone recog- 
nized the importance and originality of the work, and it 
won unstinted praise from even his Catholic opponents. 
The shadow lay upon him still, but now it was of the 
texture of twilight, not of the desolate night that had 
seemed unending. Personally, he felt certain that his 
work had been wrought in the grace of his Master. 

The Church, it seemed to the aging priest, would 
never trust him fully, and he was prepared to go down 
to his grave in that atmosphere of faint suspicion 
which to a zealous Catholic apostle is the most harrow- 
ing form of bondage. Then, almost in the twinkling 
of an eye, there was wrought one of those profound 
changes in the direction of the Church by which the 
Spirit of God seems to guard her from decay, and Leo 
XIII came from seclusion to the throne of Peter. He 
had long been aware of Newman's importance, and 
when a petition came from the leaders of English 
Catholicism asking that their aged guide be elevated 
to the Cardinalate, the Holy Father gladly acceded to 
the request. The aged Oratorian understood well the 
meaning of the dignity: "The cloud has been lifted 



54 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

from me forever," was his grateful recognition. After 
the formal ceremony in Rome, May 12, 1879, he re- 
turned to his beloved Birmingham whence he stirred 
only on certain occasions. Serene, deeply interested 
in the rhythm of life throughout the world, he waited 
calmly for the end, which came after a brief illness, 
on August 11, 1890. On the pall over his coffin were 
embroidered the words he had chosen for his shield: 
"Cor ad Cor Loqmtwr" And, indeed, the numbers 
who attended his burial, the multitude of souls for 
whom he had been a patient spiritual father, felt that 
they summed up the blessed secret of his life. 

No portrait of Newman can be complete, and this 
one is only a poor sketch. We will not close, how- 
ever, without some attempt to indicate the little 
human things that stressed his individuality and made 
him lovable. He was, of course, an apostle first of 
all, with intense convictions and absolute purity of 
sentiment. Then, too, he was a poet, with all the deli- 
cate sensibility of an artistic nature born to the 
nuances of loveliness and pain. But though the af- 
fection he offered his friends was regally crowned by 
the greatness of his mission, though the majesty of his 
personality was felt by all who entered his life, he 
was also tender, solicitous, and charming. No letters 
to children are more delicately child-like than his; no 
debater was ever more magnanimous to his opponents ; 
no friend ever stood nearer to a friend than he did to 
Hurrell Froude or Ambrose St. John. The light of 
the peace in his heart was unflinching. Nature he 
fathomed as deeply as Wordsworth; he divined with 
satisfaction the inner harmony of great art; music 



THE PERSONALITY OF NEWMAN 55 

was his constant solace, and he played on the violin 
those great visions of Beethoven and Mozart to which 
his spirit responded with the gentleness of perfect un- 
derstanding. "His soul was in his voice," says Canon 
Holland, "as a bird is in its song." Gifted with a 
ready, though delicate, sense of humour, he would occa- 
sionally run the rapier of satire through an unwary 
impertinence. He could even be sternly acrid and 
snub Monsignor Talbot, his officious though masked 
opponent in Rome, with something akin to the cruelty 
of vengeance. In many ways, of course, he remained 
a staid Victorian, but, more than any of his contem- 
poraries realized, he was a daring innovator, the bearer 
of a new beacon, the apostle of tomorrow. The mys- 
tery of sanctification in his private life made of his 
career a rounded whole. In the words of Chaucer, 

"Christus' lore and His apostles twelve 
He taught, but first he followed it himselve." 



CHAPTER FOUR 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 



"Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth and error, but 
that anything is truth to a man which he troweth?" 

"Grammar of Assent." 

THE personality of Newman was, as has been said, 
a religious force; his thinking was quite simply 
the bulwark of that force, supporting it in the 
conflict with intellectual representatives of the skeptical 
world. Nowadays philosophy is largely academic, and 
its teachers are generally men who bring to a special 
branch of thought a vast erudition and a scarcely less 
vast disdain for practical interference in the spiritual 
affairs of the day. Newman, however, did not study 
the mind for its own sake, but because of faith; in 
analyzing the powers of the soul he sought to find 
battlements where religion could hold fast against the 
attacks of atheism in its most insinuating and plaus- 
ible forms. He wished to show that, when all the 
hypotheses of skeptical science had been granted, there 
remained ample reason for a complete confidence in the 
truth of revealed religion. No opportunity was 
missed; by treatise, by sermon, by pamphlet, and by 
private correspondence he tried to lend to those in 
need of it the assistance which he had found so valu- 
able during the conflict within himself. Newman's 
thought is moulded into a thousand shapes, hidden in 

56 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 57 

a thousand places ; in none does it stand complete, but 
nowhere, also, does it stand alone. 

Emphatically, the great Cardinal's thought was not 
in any sense of the word a patchwork. That which 
guided his mind always was a single apostolic mission, 
a rarely disturbed consecration to the things of the 
Faith. Looking upon the business of life as an in- 
tensely practical affair, where the great goal is har- 
mony between creature and Creator, where the great 
rule of conduct is the Christian religion, he saw with 
dismay that the skeptic could plausibly deny the reality 
of both Creator and Christianity, or could, at least, 
affirm the essential intangibleness of both. Newman 
went through life a Defensor Fidel, and because his 
influence was handicapped by the lack of an adequate 
theory of knowledge, he set about to discover one. Be- 
cause the differences between the primitive Church and 
its modern successor had not been satisfactorily ac- 
counted for, he constructed his doctrine of Develop- 
ment to reconcile old and new. Whenever he thought 
that an argument of his would meet an objection and 
dispose of it, he set that argument down. It is his 
purpose that gives to Newman's thought an admirable 
unity and a remarkable practicality, though in form 
it is diffuse. This unity is rendered more striking by 
the fact that no phase of modern thought escaped his 
notice, and that he could read the souls of other men 
as easily as he fathomed his own. 

The many-sided genius of Newman and the multi- 
farious shapes in which it sought expression make his 
total achievement difficult to follow. It may be well 
to begin with what seems to have been his chief con- 
cern — a problem that has stirred the modern world 



58 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to its depths, even as it shook the old. The existence 
of God has been universally accepted as a fact by all 
peoples to account for the Source of all good and the 
end of all aspirations of the human soul. For New- 
man these reasons for believing in a Creator were 
strengthened by his absolute trust in the voice of con- 
science, a voice that speaks unmistakably to the moral 
nature of man of a Moral Lawgiver. On the other 
hand, he realized unflinchingly that there is evil in 
the world, evil of such magnitude that it can never be 
compassed. Now as the reason of man was steadily 
trained upon this monstrous fact, as it came to learn 
more of the processes of nature and the constitution 
of the cosmos, there was grave danger that the material 
order of things would be considered a sufficient explana- 
tion of all existence, and that the idea of the Per- 
sonality of God and the reality of His Providence would 
be thought chimerical. Men would say, had said, that 
there was no tangible evidence for the action of God 
in the world, while on the other hand proof of the 
total indifference of natural laws and natural forces 
was overwhelming. Why, then, set up the idea of 
Absolute Good and serve it, instead of taking the uni- 
verse as it is, a blind entity of mingled good and evil, 
governed by immutably rigid "legislation" and only 
vaguely capable of betterment? Newman understood 
this point of view very fully; in fact, skeptics from 
Huxley to Paul E. More have felt that he himself 
was at least half an unbeliever. 

The mystery of evil is always somewhere in the back- 
ground of Newman's sermons, but is, perhaps, best 
stated in that celebrated passage of the "Apologia" 
which reads: 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 59 

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, 
its various history, the many races of man, their starts, 
their fortunes, their mutual alienations, their con- 
flicts ; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms 
of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, 
their random achievements and acquirements, the im- 
potent conclusion of long-standing facts, "the tokens, 
so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the 
blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers 
or truths, the progress of things, as if from unrea- 
soning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness 
and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short 
duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the dis- 
appointments of life, the defeat of good, the success 
of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence 
and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the cor- 
ruptions, the dreary hopeless ir religion, that condi- 
tion of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly de- 
scribed in the apostle's words, 'having no hope and 
without God in the world'; — all this is a vision to 
dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense 
of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond 
human solution." 

This, he felt, was the real state of affairs, but human 
reason would busy itself with a solution; having dis- 
carded the authority of a teaching Church, it would 
pride itself more and more upon its discovery of hidden 
natural forces and their practical applications; it 
would erect the dogma of science on the one hand, and, 
acting as the "universal solvent" on the other, would 
decry every idea of the super-physical, and make of 
the moral law revealed by God a mythological caprice, 
a delusion that could not endure the test to which 
other hypotheses are subjected. Newman realized the 



60 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

fascination of the skeptical mood, and in fact stated 
the "creed" of the agnostic very brilliantly before even 
the term had been invented. 

"The teacher then, whom I speak of," he says, "will 
discourse thus in his secret heart . . . without denying 
that in the matter of religion some things are true 
and some things are false, still we certainly are not in 
a position to determine the one or the other. And, 
as it would be absurd to dogmatize about the weather, 
and say that 1860 will be a wet season or a dry season, 
a time of peace or war, so it is absurd for men in 
our present state to teach anything positive about the 
next world, that there is a heaven, or a hell, or a last 
judgment, or that the soul is immortal, or that there 
is a God. It is not that you have not a right to your 
own opinion, as you have a right to place implicit 
trust in your own banker, or in your own physician, 
but undeniably such persuasions are not knowledge, 
they are not scientific, they cannot become public 
property, they are consistent with the allowing of 
your friend to entertain the opposite opinion; and if 
you are tempted to be violent in the defense of your 
own view of the case in this matter of religion, then 
it is well to lay seriously to heart whether sensitive- 
ness on the subject of your banker or your doctor, 
when he is handled skeptically by another would not 
be taken to argue a secret misgiving in your mind about 
him, in spite of your confident profession, an absence 
of clear unruffled certainty in his honesty or in his 
skill." 

From experience he knew that the Christian view 
of the world seems ascetic and that its mandates of 
sacrifice demand an effort of the will acting on motives 
of a very unmaterial complexion. Men living in the 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 61 

here and now must bridge the chasm to eternity before 
they can commune with the Creator ; and the crossing 
is difficult to make. Epicures like Omar prefer cash 
to credit; Positivists, nobly Stoical though they be, 
prefer paradise on earth to heaven beyond. There is, 
sometimes even in religious minds, the desire that the 
Just Judge might be eliminated from the field of human 
action. Why not, then, follow the obvious choice of 
modern reason and substitute pantheism or naturalism 
for the Christian scheme? 

In this manner — though the statement we have given 
is bare to the utmost — did Newman visualize the pro- 
test of scientific reason to Faith, long before it became 
the strong commonplace that it is today. In a very 
remarkable way he anticipated the future, divining 
even some of the general positions which skeptical phi- 
losophy would take up — Evolution, for instance, and 
the realm of the subconscious. Nevertheless, he did 
vastly more than state the case of the opposition: un- 
aided, opposed even by his own friends, he indicated 
the broad formations which Christian apologetics 
must assume in the combat with the world. The old 
evidences, nicely arranged in mathematical tableaux, 
were good but ineffective; they had never convinced 
many, nor did they confront the spirit of the times on 
the ground where it lay entrenched. For the eager 
apostle they were baggage, scarcely more. Newman 
did not succeed, as did St. Thomas, in stating a syn- 
thesis in which the prevailing philosophic doctrines were 
brought into harmony with the faith. His incomplete 
success was in some ways the direct result of his genius ; 
he forestalled his opponents by attacking their argu- 
ments before they had been drawn up ; he did not have 



62 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the benefit of the full, free, cooperative discussion of 
the Middle Ages, but was hampered by narrow theo- 
logical interference from men whose understanding of 
the issues at stake was childish, and besides he was, 
like all other moderns, too individual to work har- 
moniously with his neighbors. 

It remains for us to consider some of the solutions 
Newman offered for the difficulties created by a skep- 
tical view of life. In the first place, if one wishes to 
show that Faith is just as sensible as demonstration, 
that the mind can believe, it is necessary to present 
a correct sketch of the mind, or, in more technical 
language, to provide an adequate theory of knowledge. 
This, however, is difficult, for as Newman said: "The 
human mind is unequal to its own powers of apprehen- 
sion; it embraces more than it can master." It is all 
very well to talk of logic and demonstration, but these 
are useful only in limited fields, just as the spade is 
efficient in a garden-plot, but scarcely practical for 
turning the sod of a vast plantation. In proceeding, 
then, to explain the processes by which the mind can 
arrive at a justifiable conclusion, Newman became ex- 
ceedingly broad and subtle ; while insisting on the con- 
crete and supplying a wealth of striking illustrations, 
he was dealing with a subject which is almost incapable 
of definition and which assuredly requires acute atten- 
tion. Again, while the "Grammar of Assent" is his 
most exhaustive treatment of the problem, it had been 
considered already in the "University Sermons" and 
to a lesser extent in the "Dublin Lectures." 

First, he set out resolutely to attack the exorbitant 
claims of logic. Relying on a remarkably shrewd 
psychological insight, he showed that the assents 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 63 

treated of in this science are only notional, or in a 
way abstract, while the mind in practice requires real, 
or concrete, assent. Logic does not reach to the first 
principles upon which inferential thinking is based, or 
take up those hidden but very effective working pro- 
cesses of the soul which arrive at conclusions accurately, 
but which underlie consciousness so completely that if 
a man is asked how he came to hold this or that belief 
he is unable to explain his way step by step, although 
he knows its entire safety. There is no such thing 
in real life as a detailed enumeration of the reasons 
why a certain conclusion has been arrived at and acted 
upon. 

Again, logic is the refuge of the non-original mind, 
which cannot employ the inexplicable gift of intuition, 
by means of which genius reaches its goal with the 
sudden directness of a ray of light. For these rea- 
sons and more, it is not entitled to the elaborate claims 
that have been made for it. One must bear in mind 
that Newman does not cast the science of demonstra- 
tion overboard ; on the contrary, he places a high esti- 
mate on it wherever it proves useful, as this passage 
from the "Apologia" will suffice to indicate: "There 
was a contrariety of claims between the Roman and 
Anglican religions, and the history of my conversion 
is simply the process of working it out to a solution." 
There is involved in this part of the great Oratorian's 
theory, many think, a distinct anticipation of and 
application to apologetics of the modern theory of 
subliminal consciousness. 

Man, however, is not merely a machine that ratioci- 
nates; he is primarily a person who acts. Conse- 
quently, his conclusions will surely be modified by 



64 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

motives, conscious or otherwise, and he will have dif- 
ficulty in arriving at the Truth. Can he attain to it? 

"Shall we say," Newman asks, "that there is no 
such thing as truth and error, but that anything is 
truth to a man which he troweth? And not rather, as 
the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, 
and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon 
us through the medium of our moral as well as our 
intellectual being; and that in consequence that per- 
ception of its first principles which is so natural to us 
is enfeebled, obstructed, perverted, by the allurements 
of sense and the supremacy of self, and, on the other 
hand, quickened by aspiration after the supernatural; 
so that at length two characters of mind are brought 
out into shape, and two standards and systems of 
thought — each logical, yet contradictory of each other, 
and only not antagonistic because they have no com- 
mon ground on which they can conflict." 

If, then, the Unseen Things in which a man has 
faith are not manifested directly by the science of rea- 
son and may be modified by the inclinations of the 
moral or conative nature, how shall we know that the 
conception of those Unseen Things which is formed 
in our minds is in consonance with reality? How 
shall we be saved from superstition on the one hand 
and from unbelief on the other? Newman argues that 
faith is based on slight evidence but on overwhelming 
antecedent probabilities existing in close union. Thus, 
a miracle is evidence to a religious mind of the truths 
of Revelation ; whereas to Hume, the atheist, it is an 
illusion because miracles are ipso facto impossible. In 
both cases the mind acts upon presumptions which are 
dictated by what Newman later termed the "illative 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 65 

sense" — that is, the living mind's power to weigh prob- 
able causes, analogies, and desirable effects which can- 
not be arranged in logical order. Although the indi- 
vidual who believes cannot state the reasons for his 
faith in perfect order, his mind has satisfied itself on 
the validity of those reasons. So much for faith; but 
"Right faith is the faith of a right mind; right faith 
is an intellectual act done in a certain moral disposi- 
tion. ... As far as and wherever Love is wanting, so 
far and there, Faith runs into excess or is perverted." 

This recognition of the important part which the 
will plays in the determinations of the mind is one of 
the most striking parts of Newman's subtle apolo- 
getics; it is virtually the anticipation of a line of 
thought which, pushed farther, would be called Prag- 
matism. The lectures of William James on the Prag- 
matic System set out to show that every truth must 
be essentially verifiable, which means that our experi- 
ences must find it coincident with themselves. Thus 
we conclude that truth is what is useful, the word being 
taken in no mere Hedonistic or Utilitarian sense, but 
as synonymous with being capable of satisfying ethic- 
ally the observer and the thinker. Stripped of vague- 
ness and strengthened by a firm reliance upon the ob- 
jectivity of intellectual and moral standards, this 
becomes Newman's doctrine of "antecedent prob- 
ability" and "the right mind." 

In still another way did Newman show his reliance 
on the practical, conative side of human nature: in 
his statement of the reasons for believing in the exist- 
ence of God. Here he seems to reduce, in accordance 
with the spirit of his age, the intellectual evidence to 
a minimum. For physical arguments, particularly the 



66 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

one from design, he seems to care very little; nor does 
he regard as probable any direct communication with 
the Unseen since the days of Revelation, thus discard- 
ing the testimony of mystic saints and the theology to 
which they have contributed. Miracles even appear 
to him rather ineffective arguments against the un- 
believer, although they are most important to the 
Christian and deserve his humble credence. The apos- 
tle in Newman had decided correctly; for the atheist 
like Zola, when confronted with evidence which he can- 
not controvert, will distort the facts willfully in order 
to save his negative first principles. That which 
makes the existence of God absolutely certain for New- 
man is the voice of conscience, speaking within the 
soul of man and imposing its "ought" with the sanction 
of Eternal Authority. Here is the root of action and 
the root of belief; here is the point d'appui for the 
spirit lost in the din of a moving world. Religion's 
"large and deep foundation is the sense of sin and 
guilt, and without this sense there is for man, as he is, 
no genuine religion." Conscience insists upon the 
good, teaches the God of Judgment and Justice; for, 
by its emotional character, "it always involves the 
recognition of a living object towards which it is 
directed." It is an "instinct" for the Supernatural 
and Divine ; though it may be perverted, it will not die 
without anguish; but if it is heeded it "has a living 
hold on truths which are really to be found in the 
world, though they are not on the surface," it reads 
the scroll of the world by its own steady light and is 
able to assume that the laws of nature "are consistent 
with a particular Providence." It is, therefore, "a 
connecting principle between the creature and the 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 67 

Creator"; and thus we have the ontological argument 
of St. Anselm concretized, made real and practical, 
and brought out of the mists of a faulty idealism 
within the range of every honest man. We cannot 
hope to review here any adequate treatment of this 
most vital section of Newman's philosophy; what has 
been said may suffice, however, to give an idea of the 
general trend of his thinking. 

From this deep and subtle recognition of "facts as 
they are" Newman was driven to admit that, despite 
the tremendous questions involved, personal interest 
and right disposition are prerequisite to successful 
theological investigation. While the ordinary man 
will receive truths and the inferences drawn from then 
on "testimony," the especially gifted individual alone 
can assure progress in the science of theology or ven- 
ture to study the ultimates of religious consciousness. 
Nevertheless, just as the pragmatist would verify his 
findings by the compass of normal beliefs, or "common 
sense," so the personal element in Newman's theistic 
inquiry is guided by the coordination of the single 
mind with other living minds. "Truth," he says, "is 
wrought out by many minds working freely together," 
and he, therefore, had great sympathy with the open 
discussion which prevailed during the Middle Ages — 
something like which the Oxford Movement had been 
Moreover, since conscience and the right frame of mind 
are so essential and so beset with temptation, since 
Revelation, once given, is the bulwark of all times, he 
naturally sought out the one divinely appointed Power 
which can successfully resist the attacks of reason and 
the seductiveness of the world; this, he saw, is the 
Catholic Church. Obviously, this part of his theory, 



68 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

when isolated, gives critics the opportunity to say that 
Newman submitted to Rome in order to save his belief 
in the supernatural; however, the statement falls to 
the ground when this item is carefully correlated with 
the rest of his thought. Repeatedly he emphasized the 
fact that faith can exist "without creed or dogma"; 
but understanding human nature as it is, taking the 
facts in the case, he saw clearly that such faith was 
little likely to endure in the teeth of a hostile world, 
and that besides being the guardian of Revelation the 
Church is the medium of the sacramental graces that 
make for supernatural life. 

At this point Newman came face to face with a new 
objection and met it in a way that is truly remarkable. 
Reason must follow and study the revealed truths in 
the Christian dispensation, and in history reason has 
done so. "At the very beginning," says Newman, "St. 
Paul, the learned Pharisee, was the first fruits of that 
gifted company, in whom the pride of conscience is 
seen prostrate before the foolishness of preaching." 
The successive victories of the Fathers over heresy, 
the devotion of the saints, the energy of monastic or- 
ders, and the decrees of Popes and Councils, have sur- 
rounded the simple precepts of revealed religion with 
a dense array of dogmas. Is not, then, the greater 
part of the Church's teaching today the work of 
human minds whose conclusions do not warrant any 
more adherence than that given to systems of philoso- 
phy? Or is it all Divine? By a striking anticipation 
of the evolutionary hypothesis, Newman answered these 
questions with his idea of the development of Christian 
doctrine. In his essay on the subject he maintains 
that what seem at first sight to be mere extraneous 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 69 

additions to the teaching of the Saviour are in fact 
outgrowths of a living, active power, inhabiting that 
teaching and developing it in consonance with the needs 
of the time. By a careful analysis of the history of 
dogma, he shows that the Scriptures are capable of 
diverse interpretations and have, in fact, received them ; 
but, far from countenancing any change, the Church 
has kept the same viewpoint from the beginning, hav- 
ing merely expounded and clearly stated its belief 
when occasion demanded. Theology, then, becomes not 
a repository for dead corollaries and rigid syllogisms, 
but an organic body, every member of which is infused 
with life from the center. As a matter of fact, this 
theory of Newman is considered by many as his ablest 
contribution to the thought of the world; it is at the 
very least a satisfactory test of the originality of his 
mind. 

Thus stated, Newman's system will be found to pos- 
sess coherence and ample breadth of view. It has al- 
ready been suggested, however, that he differed largely 
from the representative philosopher in the use which 
he made of his thought. Essentially speculative, he 
proved the worth of speculation by combining with his 
critique of reason a rich imagination and a burning 
will. His thought is never divorced from the actual, 
from the here and now. Although his avowed respect 
for Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Bacon was most sincere, 
still it may be doubted whether he possessed an erudite 
knowledge of any of the three. What Newman under- 
stood perfectly was the mind of his neighbor ; he divined 
with surprising correctness not only the deficiencies, 
the cravings, and the difficulties of the individual soul, 
but also what was most likely to have a salutary effect 



70 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

on that soul. In his longer treatises he met the gen- 
eral spirit of modern times on the very field it had 
chosen for the combat ; in thousands of personal letters 
he replied to the difficulties with which those who looked 
to him for guidance were beset. Newman realized fully 
the influence of personality in teaching; where argu- 
ment proved too subtle, or dissertation too callous, he 
did not hesitate to invoke the romantic mood in the 
souls of his hearers, and thus to carry them along by 
the impetuosity of his feeling. This was the alembic 
in which his reasoning was combined with his mission 
and moulded into a unity that is as round and full as 
the world of Shakespeare, and yet as candid and recon- 
dite as the doctrines of Emmanuel Kant. 

This outline does not aspire to the presumption of 
proving that Newman was a great philosopher; it 
wishes merely to state what his philosophy was and 
how it came into being at all. When, in the "Dublin 
Lectures" Newman made a synthesis of the worth- 
while aims of education in our day, he insisted on the 
liberty of literature and science as well as upon the 
freedom and dignity of theological inquiry. Reading 
clearly the spirit of the era in which he lived, he be- 
lieved that its convictions could easily be harmonized 
with traditional Christianity, but that the practical 
acceptance of the Christian system would entail diffi- 
culty, that, in fact, the struggle with the skeptic mood 
would be intense and bitter. Newman fought with the 
weapons of genius an antagonist that was as yet 
stirring in the future's womb, forestalling the great 
offensive strategy of the evolutionist, the pragmatist, 
and the agnostic in metaphysics. Never has Christian 
apologetics wagered so much, dared to risk all with 



NEWMAN THE THINKER 71 

the confidence of absolute faith. Newman was not a 
skeptic hiding in the robes of the Church; he was an 
apostle rifling the wardrobe of the unbeliever. The 
great warrant for such an undertaking is the warrant 
which genius always demands — success. If his system 
has answered difficulties, cleared away any doubts, 
stirred religious feelings, and won souls, then it has 
been genuinely useful, whatever its departures from 
traditional method. 

However small may be the influence of heredity on 
the mind it is strange that Newman should have been 
utterly Hebraic in his devotion to the one God, and 
quite French in the nature of his philosophic thought. 
Canon Barry has outlined a parallel between Newman 
and Renan, which is interesting indeed : the imaginative 
Breton with his horror of systems and syllogisms, his 
desire to weld the ends of the world together in the 
crucible of his thought, his passage from Christian 
faith to the ironic skepticism of a totally disillusioned 
man, and Newman equally poetic, equally concrete, 
equally conscious of the multitude of deeps upon deeps 
on which the world has been built, but secure in the 
quiet citadel of his faith, obedient Christian to the end. 
Again, there is striking similarity between the faith of 
Newman and the faith of Pascal: they have the same 
distrust of reason, the same reliance on intuition, the 
same sense of the overwhelming power of evil. But, 
though Renan dreamed of conquering the world by his 
intellect, and Pascal had won it over by the greatness 
of his contempt for its follies, there lived in neither 
the flaming eagerness of the apostle which made of 
Newman an ignis ardens that fed on the saving of souls. 

Those to whom this means nothing, or who think it 



72 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of small importance, will never succeed in taking New- 
man at his true worth. One may admire his lucid 
statement of a proposition, the brilliancy of his illus- 
tration, and the subtlety of his intellect, and rightly 
so ; but these are qualities which the great Oratorian 
would have despised for their own sakes. Only when 
they served as means by which to present the message 
of the Redeemer, only when they hovered like minister- 
ing angels over desperate souls, did he value them at 
all. Newman belongs to the history of religion first, 
and then to literature. Behind him lay the past of 
Christendom with the splendour of its schools, the 
beauty of its sanctuaries, and its concern with the 
multitude of souls ; before him loomed the future of a 
world for which the Saviour had come, and from which 
He seemed about to be cast. And, finally, there existed 
nothing which could come between him and his Cre- 
ator; for he had gone, ex umbris et vmagmibus m 
veritatem. 



CHAPTER FIVE 

NEWMAN THE ARTIST 
"Heart speaketh to heart." 

NEWMAN'S work is literature, of course, because 
he was an artist. And here the difficulty is not 
that he has been underrated, but that this side 
of his genius has been distorted, to the discredit of his 
ability as a thinker and a man. "One can never get 
too much of Newman," says Augustin Birrell; Pro- 
fessor Gates has shown the remarkable suitableness of 
his style for university study, and Canon Barry has 
much to say of lights and shadows, of the "English of 
the center" and the eloquence which runs through New- 
man's every page. Nevertheless, there are people for 
whom this supreme ability detracts from the worth of 
his prose; who see in it the note of insincerity as of 
siren melody woven with honest battle-song: and thus 
the "Cambridge History" finds that the author of the 
"Apologia" was "always, subconsciously perhaps, an 
artist." As if the weather-beaten theologian whose 
gaze was resolutely fixed on the opening gates of Hell 
was some kind of scented aesthete, fashioning phrases 
for their comeliness ! He tells us, indeed, of the stern 
fatigue which the work of writing cast upon him ; of 
times when he was ready to sink exhausted beside his 
table; of the similitude between the labour of getting 

73 



74 CATHOUC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

out a book and the anguish of child-birth. He be- 
lieved that the secret of style lies in an "incommunicable 
simplicity" which arises from the fact that an author 
has a single purpose and a single vision, and that 
through all his possible amplifications he adheres to it 
sternly. Newman's literary polish is something like 
rubbing a mirror to make the image stand forth clearly 
and realistically. 

No. In order to understand Newman's artistic 
ability, one must know what Art meant to him. It 
was not Beauty only, or its reflection, but Beauty ren- 
dered useful: Beauty not as a spinster, a maiden, or a 
harlot, but Beauty wedded to Truth. To the end of 
his life he was Platonic in his love for symbols and in 
his reading of nature as a screen; hence the famous 
identification of music and angel-song, and his trust 
with Wordsworth in the religious instincts of children. 
The artist is always a man who sees things, realities, 
in pictures, who has shattered the daylight into a rain- 
bow ; but unless he is a modern or perverted artist, he 
does not turn the spectroscope upon his individual 
candle. Newman saw the splendour of God through 
the windows of the world and refused to close his eyes ; 
for his concern was not with abstractions but with 
men, images of a Creator. In consequence he was an 
artist who in following with abandon the light of his 
mission, turned the faded pathways of teaching and 
polemics to streets of glory. 

What is most interesting in Newman's controversial 
work is the poise of his personality. One feels sure 
that he has looked the ground over, calculated the 
chances of the engagement carefully, and provided 
against any emergency. There will be no impetuous 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 75 

charge on an unimportant position, no reckless fan- 
flare, or waste of energy. He will engage the enemy 
all along the line, meeting him with reinforcements 
where they are needed, but will never forget the essen- 
tial thing, which is to advance. Not that he keeps 
forces in ambush; he seems rather to deploy all his 
troops upon the field in open sight of the enemy and 
then to beat him none the less vigorously. These ele- 
ments in Newman's construction are matched by the 
spirit of his style. He is now restrained, keeping his 
natural impetuosity sternly in rein, then vigorous in 
pressing the attack, and finally exuberant, eloquent, 
copious in the triumphant din of the victory march. 
This close correspondence is found also, in a remark- 
able way, in the steady mutual development of New- 
man's mind and expression. As his religious convic- 
tions deepen, his writing hand grows more elastic and 
he is not so sparing of emotion. There is one kind 
of inner life behind the "Oxford Sermons" and another 
behind the "Dublin Lectures"; the man who wrote 
"Lead, Kindly Light" could not have composed "The 
Dream of Gerontius" ; and Wilfrid Ward is right when 
he says, "An eventful personal history and experience 
is the main cause of all that is recognized as beautiful 
in his style." 

The materials out of which Newman fashioned his 
prose were all of the best. Early in life he had felt 
the sonorous rhythm of Gibbon's somewhat archaic but 
stately sentences, and a mind that fed on Locke and 
Whately could not have been indifferent to the sense 
of a word. Besides the classics, among whom the 
Cicero who "writes Roman" was his favourite, he loved 
the older poets, particularly Crabbe and Southey 



76 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

(strange association!) and the novels of Scott and 
Thackeray. Above all, however, he owed a debt to the 
English Bible, whose simple and fascinating diction 
has benefited so many authors. Newman never played 
the "sedulous ape," but found the pen a weapon which 
he gradually and laboriously came to understand. 
There are times when he speaks with actual contempt 
of the "literary essay," and he considered his poems 
trifles devoid of intellectual significance. In short, for 
all his attachment to meditation and prayer, he was a 
plain, blunt man whose writing was part of his business 
and who strove to make of it, accordingly, an efficient 
instrument. To speak of Newman as an "artist," then, 
is to employ the word in a sense which Oscar Wilde 
would scarcely have understood; for a counterpart to 
it one must go back to the ages of Christian art, when 
monks painted the walls of their churches in order to 
gain souls; when the workman was a sculptor because 
he had an idea to express and a prayer to say in his 
daily toil ; when music sang the Miserere and the Gloria 
in the shadow of the Cross. Of course there were 
times when Newman succumbed to the temptation of 
a phrase. But the lapse is far less frequent with him 
than it was with the great churchman who most resem- 
bles him — St. Augustine. 

Among the numerous forms which Newman's writ- 
ing assumed there was, apparently, none in which his 
genius exercised itself so spontaneously as in the ser- 
mon. Here he was most closely in touch with his min- 
istry, and here his words seemed most certain of their 
effect. Moreover, as in the case of Emerson, much 
speaking gave him an accomplished ear for the effective 
sentence and provided scope for the test of his insight 



NEWMAN THE AltTIST 77 

into other souls. At first Newman felt insecure; it 
was only too true that the ideas he laid down in the 
homilies preached at Oxford led to other ideas which 
as yet he had not explored. Deeply conscious of a 
voyage upon which he was being led, he was often 
forced to grope where he should have seen. After his 
conversion this difficulty vanished, and to the day of 
his death he spoke as a man confident, calm, seeing 
things as they are. What could be more striking than 
the contrast between the style of the Oxford sermon 
on "Faith and Reason," and that on "The Second 
Spring"? Note an unusually eloquent sentence from 
the former: "He that fails nine times and succeeds the 
tenth, is a more honorable man than he who hides his 
talent in a napkin: and so, even though the feelings 
which prompt us to see God in all things, and to recog- 
nize supernatural works in matters of the world, mis- 
lead us at times, though they make us trust in evidence 
which we ought not to admit, and partially incur with 
justice the imputation of credulity, yet a Faith which 
generously apprehends Eternal Truth, though at times 
it degenerates into superstition, is far better than that 
cold, skeptical, critical tone of mind, which has no 
inward sense of an overruling, ever-present Providence, 
no desire to approach its God, but sits at home waiting 
for the fearful clearness of His visible coming, whom 
it might seek and find in due measure amid the twilight 
of the world." How evidently is the spirit here held 
in leash ! 

Place beside this a sentence chosen at random from 
that pasan of religious victory which Newman has 
called "The Second Spring" : "And in that day of trial 
and desolation for England, when hearts were pierced 



78 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

through and through with Mary's woe, at the Cruci- 
fixion of Thy Body mystical, was not every tear that 
flowed, and every drop of blood that was shed, the seeds 
of a future harvest, when they who sowed in sorrow 
would reap in joy?" The difference in inspiration here 
is quite evident. But from the clean sanctity of the 
rhythm in his later sermons Newman went apparently 
at will to the ornate eloquence of the lectures at Dublin 
University. In this case, too, his heart was wholly in 
his work, but that work trembled in the balance of Irish 
opinion. And the passage in which he treats of the 
amicable relations that had existed between England 
and the Sister Isle during the ages of faith will compare, 
for powerful appeal to an audience, with the best 
pages of Bossuet. Newman's rhetoric was the product 
of the successful and subtle blending of his own spirit 
with the views of his hearers. This it is that makes 
of oratory an art; and when the subjects upon which 
it dwells are perennially latent in the human breast, 
then it is immortal art. 

It is in the "Sermons" that the lover of Newman will 
continue to find his most profound reproductions of the 
image of this world and the next. None the less, his 
thought would scarcely have become complete, or his 
style have reached its full strength, had it not been 
for the treatises. "The Development of Christian 
Doctrine" considered merely as literature provides an 
interesting study; it was written during a period of 
tumultuous transition, and the supreme inner struggle 
of a giant mind is reflected in the sentences which 
sometimes clench like fists and then open and are ex- 
tended in conciliation. The idea of the book itself is 
original, daringly so; and the difficulties to be en- 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 79 

countered hedge it in like a circle of spears ; but 
Newman disposes of them, en passant, it would seem, 
were it not for his candour and earnestness, and moves 
steadily ahead with the force of his intuition. There 
are illuminative sketches, given by the way; brilliant 
illustrations wherever these are needed; and the whole 
is welded into a goodly vessel by indefatigable devotion 
and religious zeal. The epilogue is worth noticing, 
for it is really a dedication placed at the end. The 
author, torn by parting with his Anglican friends, 
leaves them his work for guidance, and goes into the 
future with his eyes shining but cast down with the 
weight of tears. To many these lines have seemed 
Newman's greatest prose. 

The careful study and calm, clear analysis of his- 
torical situations borne out in the essay on "Develop- 
ment" are present also in the "History of the Arians," 
the "Via Media," and the "Essays," but these works 
rarely show Newman at his best. In them the student 
is more at work than the apostle or the seer, and after 
all these are the more interesting. The "Grammar 
of Assent," however, is not only Newman's most subtle 
book, but, perhaps, after the "Apologia" his most 
brilliant in the matter of style. There are a few 
pages at the beginning unworthy of him — schoolmaster 
pages, justifiable only because the subject matter is 
too formal for inspired treatment. But what mar- 
velous passages one meets with farther on, vivid with 
analogy and concrete presentation, glowing with the 
breath of a great cause! Chapters on the awakening 
of religious ideas, on the nature of intuition, and on the 
operation of conscience, have the slow, sure march of 
conviction moving about in the labyrinth of the human 



80 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

mind with perfect tranquillity. Or again, the treat- 
ment of natural and revealed religion walks the surface 
of the sea with ideal Christian faith, and the waters are 
calm; only the heart of the pilgrim beats with the 
melody of mingled humility and joy. The "Grammar 
of Assent" is not an easy book to exhaust ; if one feels 
sufficiently interested in philosophy one can return 
often and discover new beauties, unnoticed before. It 
is an epic of the human soul, a subject perpetually in- 
teresting because of the darkness of its mystery. 

Careful handling of a philosophic theme is what 
might reasonably be expected of a man so deeply re- 
ligious as Newman, but the artistic alchemy with which 
he was gifted changed his thought into a variety of ap- 
pealing forms. Ordinarily reserved with a quite Vic- 
torian dignity, he sometimes, when occasion demanded, 
indulged in laughter that was Gallic in its incisiveness. 
There are only a few traces of it in his earlier works, 
but when he set himself to the task of defending the 
rights and reputation of Catholics, his ability proved 
startling. What an amusing and yet effective expose 
is his picture of the Russian who had discovered the 
iniquities of Blackstone and set his countrymen right. 1 
"Loss and Gain," too, intersperses the story of a con- 
vert with witty portraits, of which that of the bore 
is the most famous. Still, he was urbane here even if 
very serious ; the same quality later appeared to ad- 
vantage in the "Idea of a University," where his de- 
scription of a gentleman gives one of the most deli- 
cately ironical interpretations of insincerity to be met 
with anywhere. These things, he knew, would appeal 
to his hearers much more strongly than anything he 
could say directly. 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 81 

Occasionally, however, this note of laughter turned 
acrid and struck its man down. Thus, in his attack 
on Achilli the ex-priest Newman minced no words, and 
though the blow he delivered cost him the humiliation of 
an unfair legal trial, it silenced Achilli forever. Who 
can forget, if he has read them, the mordant para- 
graphs of the reply to Kingsley, with their terrible ar- 
raignment of the latter's method in controversy? 
Kingsley was overwhelmed, and when Newman finally 
concluded and bade his devil's advocate "fly into 
space," there was precious little of him remaining to 
take the advice. In these pages words seem to burn, 
not with the morbid light of Byron's verse, but with 
the full radiance of indignation aroused to the de- 
fense of a holy cause. But this gift, which would have 
sufficed a Junius, was, as in Pascal, severely curbed. 
It was the same with Newman's other strictly literary 
powers. In "Callista" he wrote a novel which lacks, 
indeed, the broad life of Dickens or Scott, but which 
is as finely wrought as anything by George Eliot. In 
this study of the soul of a pagan girl who awakened 
to the appeal of Christianity and finally suffered in its 
defense, Newman read the spirit of a bygone age, the 
third century, as well as anyone had read it. There 
are delightful, fascinating descriptive passages, of 
Juba's madness, for instance, and dramatic scenes like 
that of Callista's martyrdom, which are not to be found 
in everybody's novels. Of course, there is no perfect 
technique and not enough human interest to satisfy 
the inebriate fiction-reader; Newman did not write for 
him. Nevertheless it seems safe to affirm that if he had 
elected to transfer his powers to the art of story-tell- 
ing, he could have equaled the other great Victo- 



82 CATHOLIC SPIB.IT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rians in the baking of what Thackeray called "sweet- 
meats. " 

There is, however, one book which in its own time 
and ours has been accepted as the highest indication 
of Newman's literary genius. The "Apologia pro Vita 
Sua" not only gained a complete controversial victory 
over hostile public opinion, but has been confidently 
placed by great critics beside the "Confessions" of 
Saint Augustine. It captivates by the absolute candour 
of its mood and impresses by the vigor of its conviction. 
Written at white heat, out of the experiences of a life 
singularly devoted to a noble cause, the sentences lose 
everything that is not elemental and tumble after one 
another like jets of crystal water. There is in the book 
no trace of flippancy or insufficiency, but the impetus 
of a full philosophy, an intimate religion, looking upon 
life with eyes that have seen. It is Newman's genuine 
novel, the tale of a soul that has hitherto shrouded 
itself in reticence, and now dares to show the purity of 
its nakedness. The traces of pain which it cost the 
author to make the revelation are evident ; but he does 
not end until he has found the note of love and paid a 
gentle lyric tribute to the friendship that had shad- 
owed his loneliness — that of Father Ambrose St. John. 

Nevertheless, though the book is a personal record, 
it is remarkable to note how little Newman really says 
of himself; Jean Jacques would have narrated more 
private business in one chapter. What he is discussing 
are his personal beliefs, which he felt were objective 
realities that in some marvelous way had been vouch- 
safed him. Newman is frequently lost in the midst of 
Keble, Froude, Pusey, and others, but what is always 
kept in the foreground is the Faith. That alone mat- 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 



83 



tered, and unless the reader understands this fact, 
Newman's clearest book is likely to remain the most ob- 
scure. He narrated the process of his conversion, the 
long duration of his doubts, his desperate effort to per- 
severe in the face of strengthening conviction; and 
while he was quite individualistic in all these matters, 
what he was defending was the ministry of the Truth 
from the insinuation of dishonesty. That Truth would 
brook no taint, it would countenance no moral heck- 
ling; and to save it he took the last recourse of the 
apostle and became a witness, a martyr. In the Latin 
title there is the final, completing link with the original 
testimony to the Faith. 

Newman's prose is at its best in the "Apologia," 
but it is good everywhere. He could and did write badly, 
but the bulk of his work is amazingly well done. Into 
almost all of it he threw the whole of his conviction and, 
having thought out a purpose, carried it resolutely 
through to the end. A master of the high art of refu- 
tation, which not only defeats existing objections but 
visualizes and meets others before they are aware of 
existence, makes his work bristle with barricades over 
which he sweeps with enthusiasm to the goal ahead. 
Newman felt the rhythm of speech as not even Ruskin 
perceived it, and his English is the language of melody 
that winds its coils about a theme as do Bach's notes 
in a fugue. He attuned the medium of sound not only 
to his own ear but to that of his auditor, and finally 
enunciated what seems the declaration of a great style : 

"And since the thoughts and reasonings of an author 
have, as I have said, personal character, no wonder 
that his style is not only the image of his subject but 



84 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of his mind. That pomp of language, that full and 
tuneful diction, that felicitousness in the choice and 
exquisiteness in the collocation of words, which to 
prosaic writers seem artificial, is nothing else but the 
mere habit and way of a lofty intellect . . . the elo- 
cution of a great intellect is great. His language ex- 
presses, not only his great thoughts, but also his great 
self. Certainly he might use fewer words than he 
uses ; but he fertilizes his simplest ideas, and germinates 
into a multitude of details, and prolongs the march of 
his sentences, and sweeps round to the full diapason of 
his harmony as if rejoicing in his own vigor and rich- 
ness of resource." 

It remains necessary to say a word for the poetry 
which Newman created out of the leisure of his genius. 
Perfectly spontaneous, it has none of the artful diction, 
the compressed sensism, of modern verse. The lyrics 
of his earlier life, among which "Lead, Kindly Light" 
is the most popular, if not the best, are very simple 
expressions of simple moods, and in neither the thought 
nor the expression is there any of that haunting musical 
paradox which is the life of Francis Thompson. They 
either sing their way to the heart or fail utterly. "The 
Dream of Gerontius," however, is different, for there 
underlies this poem a powerfully dramatic conception. 
As the dying soul quits the earth and passes from 
judgment to the waters of purgatory, it is surrounded 
by the final life of eternity — by the rapture of the 
angels and their Maker, by the malice of the demons 
and the damned. 

"It floods me like the deep and solemn sound 
Of many waters," 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 85 

cries the soul of its guardian, at the same time describ- 
ing the quality of this poem. The songs of the Angeli- 
cals, severe in their classic restraint and yet realisti- 
cally fervent, are equal to any of the choral odes in 
Sophocles. "The Dream of Gerontius" is the only 
modern poem that could have been sung in its entirety 
under the chaste, aspiring arches of mediaeval Bourges. 

Much might be said of other special qualities in New- 
man's genius : of his remarkable method of argumenta- 
tion, for instance, which hemmed in an opponent on all 
sides with almost the cruel science of a German general 
at Sedan, left no avenue of escape, and then fell upon 
him and beat him flat to the ground. Again, Newman 
the letter-writer is an interesting figure, not only in 
the public epistles to the Duke of Norfolk, to Pusey, or 
to Bishop Ullathorne, but in that vast private cor- 
respondence which he conducted with infinite care, es- 
pecially after his conversion and during the long years 
of his Catholic repudiation, for the solace of souls, for 
the conversion of friends, or merely out of the goodness 
of his heart. The private letters reveal Newman's 
character as no other documents do: they show his 
reticence, his melancholy, his purity, his joy, his pain 
at the criticism and alienation of friends. Here he 
was intensely human and most lovable; the service 
which Wilfrid Ward rendered English literature by 
publishing them without reserve is one that can never 
be too highly appreciated. All of these matters, how- 
ever, are subjects for special study and will appeal to 
those who are fascinated by the manifold genius of a 
great Christian. 

Newman's art is, then, a large and varied gift which 
he lent unstintingly to the demands of an apostolic 



86 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

life. Intensely personal, allied to the romantics by his 
trust in instinct and emotion rather than in mere caus- 
tic ratiocination, he is a modern whose soul is in tune 
with the soul of mediaeval aspiration. There was, how- 
ever, nothing unbalanced in him, nothing simply pictur- 
esque and quite untrue ; he had the center of the Great 
Tradition as well as its trappings. Examining life as 
it appeared in the arena of a large and cautious mind, 
he avoided sacrificing harmony to exuberance, without 
losing the vitality that alone makes art to endure as 
long as the human soul. Despite the fact that Newman 
was something of a Hamlet, one is struck by the absence 
of the static within his composition, by the ease with 
which he handled his numerous weapons and brought 
them into the service of his cause. Visualizing Chris- 
tianity as a living institution which had grown into a 
great tree as the parable of the mustard seed had fore- 
told, he studied the future in the light of the past, and 
drew from both the subtle strains of his art. The 
Christian Ages were for him not dark but splendid, and 
he listened to the mingled strains of the "Dies Irae" 
and the "Tantum Ergo" coming from the temples 
where saints and kings and people worshipped, until 
his tongue had learned the rhythm of the solacing 
music that sings the love and fear of God while it muses 
bravely on the eternal mystery of Man. 



BOOK NOTE 

The works of Newman are published in a uniform edition by 
Longmans, Green and Company. There are special editions of 
some, particularly the "Apologia" and "The Dream of Gerontius." 
The best single work covering the entire period of Newman's 
activities is still "La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre," by 



NEWMAN THE ARTIST 87 

Paul Thureau-Dangin (3 vols.) of which there is now an English 
translation in two volumes. "The Life of Newman," by Wilfrid 
Ward, is the best and most complete biography and should be 
supplemented by a reading of the same author's "Last Lectures." 
Other biographies are by R. H. Hutton, W. Meynell, William 
Barry, and S. J. Fletcher. A good French view may be obtained 
from the various treatises by Henri Bremond — "The Mystery of 
Newman"; "Newman. Le Developpement du Dogme Chretien"; 
"Newman. La Vie Chretienne." See also "The Oxford Move- 
ment," by Dean Church; "The Anglican Career of Cardinal New- 
man," by Abbott; "Letters and Correspondence of Cardinal New- 
man during His Life in the English Church," edited by Anne 
Mozley (2 vols.) ; "A Memoir of Hurrell Froude," by L. I. Guiney; 
"The Life of Cardinal Manning," by Shane Leslie; "Memoirs," by 
Mark Pattison; "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy," by J. C. 
Shairp; "Phases of Thought and Criticism," by Brother Azarias; 
"The Drift of Romanticism," by Paul E. More; "Obiter Dicta," 
by A. Birrell; and "Four Studies in Literature," by Prof. Gates. 
The periodical literature on Newman is vast. One may note with 
profit, "J. H. Newman and Renan," by William Barry (Living 
Age, vol. 214:347); "Newman," by T. J. Gerard (Catholic World, 
vol. 95:61); and "Recollections of Newman," by Aubrey De Vere 
(19th Century, vol. 40:395). See in a general way the Catholic 
Encyclopedia, the "Cambridge History of English Literature," 
and Chesterton's "Victorian Age." 



CHAPTER SIX 

LEADERS AT OXFORD AND CAPTAINS OF THE CHURCH 

"Either the Catholic religion is verily the coming of the unseen 
world into this, or there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, 
nothing real in any of our notions as to whence we come and 
whither we go." Newman. 

THE Oxford Movement and the vigorous Catholic 
revival that surrounded it produced many 
strong, interesting men who challenged the at- 
tention of England with a success that often made the 
stolid, conservative citizen gasp. Most of them had 
groped their way to Rome from the outposts of Angli- 
canism, and bore not a few scars as memorials to that 
difficult pilgrimage. Some were bluff and hale; as 
intellectual leaders they lived in the din of controversy, 
and their writings do not as a rule possess the spirit of 
reflectiveness, the poise of imagination, which alone 
make art. Certain of their books are good literature, 
but most of them are simply good theology. In con- 
sidering their lives from the literary point of view, as 
we must here, it should be remembered that they wrote 
from the battle-ground where their achievements were 
stirring and fruitful; that another kind of history 
chronicles the nobility of their sacrifices and the worth 
of their campaigning. Anyhow, they were soldiers 
for a Cause, with a brusque distrust for laudation that 
concerned them personally. 

88 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 89 

In the university circle that was drawn round New- 
man there moved a number of gifted men who either 
influenced him or were developed by his teaching. Some 
of these felt to the fullest extent the beauty of Catholic 
tradition, which divides the world like a sword but heals 
the wound with the loving touch of Christ ; others were 
hard, thoughtful, farsighted men who saw, as their 
great leader did, the intellectual difficulties with which 
men around them were beset, and who humbly gave their 
lives to the solution of a great mystery. But the 
Church was larger than Oxford; and when the rift in 
English public opinion had grown wide enough to per- 
mit the action of a Catholic hierarchy, it must have 
been providential that so many enthusiastic, powerful 
leaders were ready to move towards a position where 
the Church could breathe the air of freedom, and direct 
the manifold enterprises of her apostolic mission. That 
such men were concerned with literature is a fact; 
it remains to view the result and to see what part they 
contributed to the enormous Summa in which are writ- 
ten all the fancies, aspirations, moods, and vistas of 
man. 

With the exception of Hurrell Froude, that zealous 
though hesitant student of the Christian past, whose 
"Remains" represent him inadequately in literature, 
no one influenced so strongly the development of New- 
man and his friends as John Keble. Born four years 
before Napoleon the First, and dying four years previ- 
ous to the fall of Napoleon the last, Keble' s private 
life seemed to possess all the serenity which his environ- 
ment lacked. Although a fellow of Oriel College, and 
at one time professor of poetry at Oxford, he was 
consistently the country vicar of mid- Victorian times. 



yU CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

A book of poems entitled "The Christian Year," which 
he published in 1827, made Keble as famous as he re- 
mained humble. These simple songs, half-ballad, half- 
hymn, delighted a large English public with their sin- 
cere, fresh, religious mood, the intensity of their at- 
tachment to the quiet country home, and their rich, 
fervent meditativeness. Keble felt Christianity as life, 
when so many about him thought it merely convention ; 
and the delicate reserve with which he read the divine 
symbolism of nature was at once simple and intangible. 
He would have been the last to claim for his verses 
classic form or romantic passion; he wrote always with 
a kindly friend in mind : 

"No fading frail memorial give 
To soothe his soul when thou art gone, 
But wreaths of hope for aye to live 
And thoughts of good together done." 

Despite the blemishes in the book — false analogies, 
commonplaceness of thought and expression — the 
poetry was genuine and made of its author a spiritual 
leader whose power and sincerity were recognized by 
Newman. Gifted with a beauty of character that made 
unforgettable friendships, he lacked the stern spirit 
of the truth-seeker; and with the possible exception of 
a few lectures on poetry, nothing he wrote after "The 
Christian Year" has made a lasting impression. Keble 
began the Oxford Movement by preaching the sermon 
on "National Apostasy," but he was too conservative 
to follow in the steps of Newman. Though religion 
meant everything to him, he was quite content with its 
sentiment and could never grasp the vital significance 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 91 

of dogma. To the end he remained steadfast in his al- 
legiance to those beliefs which had cast about his youth 
the radiance of joy, and which may have breathed 
into his poetic spirit something of immortality. 

Of Keble's lifelong associate in religious endeavor, 
Edward Pusey (1800-1882), it must be predicted that 
little will eventually remain of all his learned preach- 
ing and exhaustive polemics excepting the name which 
a wittier person gave to his system of theology — 
Puseyism. A sincerely spiritual man, no one ever felt 
more strongly the pressure of English tradition: it 
seemed to him most deplorable that the Anglican com- 
munion should not be considered a perfectly respect- 
able descendant of the Apostolic Church. As a protest 
against the secularizing of the Establishment, he joined 
the Oxford Movement at the hour when his aid was 
most needed, and had a share in the writing of the 
"Tracts for the Times." Later, when Newman had 
gone over to Rome, Pusey spent his efforts trying to 
effect a compromise with the Holy See. The first 
"Eirenicon" was written to emphasize certain matters 
of dogma which its author did not see his way clear to 
accept; this was followed by others when he began to 
despair of success in his dealings with Rome, and New- 
man finally replied in the tender though firm "Letter to 
Pusey." The liberal elements in Anglicanism also re- 
garded Pusey with disfavor, and his whole life may be 
construed as a fruitless attempt to fortify a religious 
position that was untenable. Nevertheless, he was a 
man whose religious enthusiasms never waned, and 
whose extravagant conservatism was saved from folly 
by its boundless charity. 

Although Keble and Pusey stood fast in their re- 



92 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

sistance to Rome, other notable Oxford men went with 
Newman along the stony road of conversion. One of 
the most interesting of these is the ebullient William 
George Ward. Born in 1812, he remained mentally 
belligerent to the day of his death in 1882. At Oxford 
Ward came under the spell of Newman, but, being 
somewhat hastier in drawing conclusions than was his 
illustrious master, succeeded in being publicly con- 
demned by the University Convocation, and in joining 
the Church on August 13, 1845. Later he taught 
theology at St. Edmund's with great success, although 
the fact that he was a layman proved an eyesore to 
many older churchmen. Cardinal Wiseman, always 
his benefactor, finally induced him to assume the editor- 
ship of the Dublin Review. 

Ward had in him many great qualities both of heart 
and mind: the master of an almost grotesque sense of 
humour, he lived in the realm of metaphysical and theo- 
logical speculation with a totality and partisanship 
rarely matched. While wielding a strong personal in- 
fluence that relied for effectiveness on candour and 
depth of thought, an influence felt and acknowledged 
by Mill and Newman alike, the written word seemed to 
rob him of his individuality. "The Ideal of a Christian 
Church," "The Philosophy of Theism," and his other 
books have little in them that is attractive for us now. 
But the man who shook Newman before his break with 
the Anglicans, who directed the Dublin Review so ably 
and so long, who undertook a rigorous defense of the 
Papacy in the face of English thought, and who 
brought the masters of the "Experience" philosophy 
to recede from more than one position, is a memorable 
and picturesque figure. Essentially he was a man of 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 93 

warm character and powerful logic, who was entirely 
redeemed from commonplaceness by the exuberance of 
his interest in religion and the heartiness of his laugh- 
ter. In a good many ways he was the Doctor John- 
son of the Catholic revival — a man of burly form, 
brusque language, fixity of conviction, and fundamental 
melancholy. To his last day he was a fighter, though 
he loved best the charity of peace; and from the first 
he was a friend, no matter how strenuous the contro- 
versy or how definite the disagreement. 

As Ward threw all his fervent energy into the ex- 
amination of the metaphysical aspects of religion, so a 
beloved priest and friend of Newman, Father Frederick 
William Faber, gave his strength to the creation of 
devotional literature. The beauty of Catholic practice 
had led him to scrutinize his early religious beliefs, 
and of that beauty he never grew tired of writing. 
Born in 1814, Faber entered Balliol College in due 
time, and having taken orders became rector at Elton. 
The spell of Newman drew him irresistibly to the 
Church, however, and his conversion took place in 
1845. After a short stay in Birmingham he established 
the Brompton Oratory in London, proved indefatig- 
able in the performance of his religious duties, and 
gained great fame as a devotional writer. He died in 
1863. Father Faber's temperament was naturally ar- 
dent, but his lovable disposition is best testified to, per- 
haps, by the response of his Anglican congregation at 
Elton to his announcement of dissatisfaction with the 
doctrine he was preaching. They begged him to preach 
any doctrine he pleased, but to remain with them. 

Faber has scarce an equal in English as a writer of 
devotional books. Such volumes as "At the Foot of 



94« CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the Cross" combine some of the fervour of St. Teresa 
with the sweetness of St. Francis. Veuillot described 
their power by saying, "He has strange tweezers for 
getting at the finest and most hidden fibers under the 
skin which he removes so dexterously." Of his poeti- 
cal writings, influenced so deeply by an intimate un- 
derstanding of the beautiful natural surroundings in 
which he had been reared, it is enough to say that some 
are like Wordsworth at his best, others like Words- 
worth at his worst, but all of them like Wordsworth. 
How well the following stanza presents the enchant- 
ment of a winter night at Oxford: 

"The winter night, when, as a welcome boon, 
Down the giant stems the stealthy beams may glide, 
And stray sheep lie sleeping in the moon 
With their own fairy shadows at their side; 
While through the frosty night air every tower 
In Abingdon and Oxford tolls the hour." 

The current of Catholicism at Oxford was swollen 
by the addition of many other men, whose learning, in- 
tegrity, and piety have influenced the soul of England 
more than we can tell, but whose literary talents were 
comparatively small. The flood of writing which 
swirls round this fountain of vigorous spiritual energy 
contains much that is valuable temporarily, much that 
slakes the quest about it, but which dries up as the 
years move and soil is drenched and new genius finds 
new sources of inspiration. Still, it cannot be out of 
place to recall in passing the name of T. W. Allies, tire- 
less journalist and controversalist, whose "Life's De- 
cision" is still a readable book; Father Dalgairns, the 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 95 

intimate friend of Newman; Lady Herbert, a graceful 
and intimate writer; and of others not so closely as- 
sociated with Oxford, though their spirits followed its 
message, Kegan Paul, for instance, and Father Mar- 
tineau, whose sermons moved the hearts of numerous 
people who had grown indifferent to preaching and are, 
in printed form, rarely beautiful testimonials to a 
natural eloquence. Nor does the lover of this revival 
forget those toilers whose names and books are for- 
gotten, who will soon have fallen into the general obliv- 
ion with the people they served, but who are stalwart, 
surely, in the sight of Him they loved. 



II 



Among the captains of the Church in modern Eng- 
land, especially among those who had gifts for letters 
and used them, the plain though enigmatic figure of 
Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning is probably the 
most arresting. For years he watched over the re- 
ligious life of London with resolute and far-seeing eyes ; 
his way into the Church seems somehow more acrid or 
worldly than Newman's; and no modern Englishman 
has stood so close to the Papal throne or been so in- 
timately associated with sweeping ecclesiastical re- 
forms. But, though he moved constantly among men, 
preaching, organizing, attending philosophic discus- 
sions, and even settling strikes, no one in his age lived 
more absolutely alone: as Francis Thompson has it: 

"Anchorite, who didst dwell 
With all the world for cell. . . . 
You smelt the Heaven-blossoms.'* 



96 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The shadow cast over the memory of Manning by 
the malicious biography of Purcell has already been 
lifted somewhat, and now that the Life by Shane Leslie 
has appeared, it will undoubtedly be entirely dis- 
pelled. He was born in 1808, the son of an influential 
financier, entered Oxford in due time, and later accepted 
a position in the Colonial Office. The call to the sacred 
ministry proved insistent, however, and upon his elec- 
tion to a fellowship in Merton College Manning took 
orders, married, and accepted a curacy. When his wife 
died, he was appointed archdeacon of Chicester, where 
he remained until his conversion in 1851. Ordained al- 
most immediately, he studied in Rome for a time, and 
then returned to London, where he established the Con- 
gregation of the Oblates of St. Charles. A vigorous 
zeal for missionary organization brought ecclesiastical 
recognition ; and upon the death of Wiseman, Manning 
became the Archbishop of Westminster; later, in 1875, 
he was made cardinal. At his death in 1892, there was 
an expression of grief rarely equalled for universality; 
the funeral was attended by people of all classes, for, 
while his relations with the leaders of Britain had been 
close, the Cardinal's heart bled for the poor. 

His was the character of the reformer, martial, domi- 
nant, at times overbearing. If Newman was too sensi- 
tive, Manning was almost brutal. There was some- 
thing in him of that stern quality of Alphonsus Li- 
gouri, which made the great Redemptorist saint com- 
mand a transgressing cleric to step on a crucifix, "for 
he had already done so in spirit." England was a field 
that needed plowing badly, and Manning chafed at 
everything that resembled cautious restraint, was for 
getting to work on the hour. The saving fact is that 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 97 

he actually mastered the appalling: reorganization of 
the clergy, rescue work among the poor, revivified 
Catholic education, and outspoken public action were 
successfully undertaken. As the "Workingmen's 
Cardinal" he directed public attention to industrial 
evils, and was Leo XIII's chief adviser for the famous 
encyclical, "On the Condition of Labour." It must be 
admitted, however, that his enthusiasm was often im- 
prudent; the attitude he took on Infallibility and on 
the Temporal Power, his unfriendly relations with re- 
ligious orders, were assuredly not wise. Manning was 
no intellectual Napoleon, though he might well have 
congratulated himself occasionally on playing the Iron 
Duke. 

Some of this rigorous quality of efficiency, this re- 
former's mood, is always to be found in his writing and 
despoils it of that candour of thought and expression, 
that chaste whiteness of style, which great books must 
have. Certain of his treatises, "The Eternal Priest- 
hood," and "The Temporal Mission of the Holy 
Ghost," for instance, may continue to interest theo- 
logians, but the aridity of their inspiration will grow 
more apparent as time advances. If Manning is known 
to the future as a writer, it will surely be for his pri- 
vate journals. They are the records of a searching 
and powerful self-analysis, and the following extract 
may serve to indicate their character and, also, to give 
some insight into the soul of Manning: 

"When I look down upon London from this garden 
and know that there are before me nearly 3,000,000 of 
men of whom 200,000 are nominally in the Paith and 
Grace of the Church, that 1,500,000 never set foot in 



98 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

any place of even fragmentary Christian worship, that 
hundreds of thousands are living and dying without 
baptism, in all the sins of the flesh and spirit, in all 
that Nineveh and the Cities of the Plain and Imperial 
Rome ever committed, that it is the Capital of the most 
anti-Christian Power of the nominally Christian world, 
and the head of its anti-Christian spirit ... I confess 
I feel that we are walking on the waters and that noth- 
ing but the word and presence of Jesus makes this 
great calm. I feel sure that the mission for London 
is to preach the Love of God and the Love of Jesus, 
and that in the spirit and the voice of love. They 
will listen to no denunciations and no controversy. 
They will only stone us before they understand us." 1 

The lovable, influential Cardinal who preceded Man- 
ing is still remembered and revered for the fine humane 
ness of his character. In thinking of Wiseman one 
feels the keen truth of Chesterton's epigram: "The 
two persons that a healthy man hates most between 
heaven and hell are a man who is dignified and a woman 
who is not." The secret of his amazing success in the 
rebuilding of the Catholic Church in England, was per- 
haps, his ability to show that a bishop might be a man. 
The time was crowded with stirring religious events: 
the conversion of the Oxford leaders, the restoration 
of Catholic hierarchy, the appearance, after many 
years of repression, of the Catholic man in public life. 
Wiseman, going everywhere, discussing the most di- 
verse questions, gained the ears of a public which had 
hitherto regarded "Papists" as preposterous wretches 
ostracizing themselves for an absurd delusion. The 
many-sidedness and the cosmopolitan background of 

1 Dublin Review, Jan., 1920. Vol. 166. 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 99 

his personality were exactly what was needed for the 
work in hand. Born in 1802 of an English family re- 
siding in Seville, and having spent his early years in 
Ireland, Wiseman was educated in England and in 
Rome, became rector of the English College in the 
Papal city, acquired fame for linguistic ability, and 
made friends of Popes and all the noteworthy per- 
sonages of Europe. His tact was as astonishing as 
his energy, and his Cardinalate was something like a 
reign. Though infirm in his old age and accordingly 
unable to cope with the nuances of ecclesiastical policy, 
he was universally venerated until his death in 1865. 

Wiseman's eloquence, though it served the cause 
well on numerous occasions, lacked the searching analy- 
sis of eternal truths and the delicately attuned expres- 
sion that made of Newman the immortal preacher. 
Nor do the treatises he wrote on important questions 
seem vital enough to hold their own in the maze of 
books. "Recollections of the Last Four Popes," how- 
ever, is charmingly written reminiscence, and supplies 
an English .view of the Vatican during some historic 
and stormy years. Still, it is as the author of "Fabi- 
ola" that Wiseman will live, if at all, in letters. Catho- 
lics generally have loved the exquisite piety and charm- 
ing characterization of this tale of the catacombs, and 
may be pardoned for having overlooked its somewhat 
slipshod construction and the tinge of sentimentalism 
that spoils its art. After all, no one has done a better 
book on the earlier Christian story, and probably no 
one ever will. 

Though there. are other Cardinals who, like Herbert 
Vaughan, did good work for English letters, we shall 
pass them by and make a brief mention of a most in- 



100 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

teresting man, Archbishop Ullathorne (1806-1889). 
This sturdy assistant of Wiseman and defender of New- 
man has told the story of his life better than any one 
else could. In addition to being a member of the hier- 
archy, he was a Benedictine and championed his order 
bravely. As the author of "The Endowments of Man" 
Ullathorne deserves some attention as a writer in phi- 
losophy, and his letters reveal a mastery of that diffi- 
cult form of composition. His "Autobiography," how- 
ever, is his masterpiece and a genuinely original and 
fascinating book. It is one of the delightful few among 
life-stories which are personal without bein^ egotistical ; 
it has also the advantage of incident. The Archbishop 
had led a roaming, lusty life, that took him first to sea 
and later to the saving of souls. One doubts that De- 
foe could have told the story of Ullathorne's missionary 
experiences among the convicts in Australia with more 
gusto or better disposition of detail. Shane Leslie de- 
clares that he has always preferred the Autobiography 
to "Robinson Crusoe," and the comparison is not at all 
bold. Whereas it is the glory of Defoe to have given 
fiction the appearance of sober fact, the Archbishop 
may be said to have clothed reality with the graces of 
entrancing narrative. He was very decidedly Eng- 
lish, loving the sea, his plain fellowmen, and a round 
tale as every good man ought to love such things. The 
religious background of his life is, of course, duly 
stressed, but the apostolic character of the writer in- 
volved none of the contemplativeness, the inner intel- 
lectual struggle, of such a genius as Newman. Instead, 
the saving of souls is attempted with ardour on board 
French whalers, in Chili, New South Wales, England, 
Ireland, and France, in prison and on the episcopal 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 101 

throne. Quite evidently, the noble Archbishop, who 
was as kind-hearted as he was zealous, took great pleas- 
ure in the writing, although the book was not intended 
for publication, but merely for the satisfaction of a 
few friends. What frank courage, what keen relish 
for a spiritualized democracy it reveals! Here is a 
tonic for tired souls. 

In general, when one thinks of the genius, the energy, 
and the fervour which the leaders of England's new- 
born Catholicism brought to the performance of their 
extremely difficult tasks, when one remembers the tem- 
per of that Britain whose deep-rooted contempt for 
Rome was suddenly confronted with Rome's accredited 
representatives, one cannot help believing humbly that 
the Spirit of God was active in them as it was in the 
first Apostles. It is not strange that so much of their 
writing was mediocre; the wonder is that they found 
time to write at all. Art is necessarily self-centered, 
comparatively uninterested in the struggle of surround- 
ing souls. And yet the journals of the ubiquitous Man- 
ning, the life-story of Ullathorne, who was as active in 
missionary labours as a Jesuit martyr, and the "Fabi- 
ola" of Wiseman, written almost while waiting for 
trains, are books that have given to English literature 
new points of view, and to Catholics a record of glory 
which they can never cherish too deeply. While these 
great men laid safe and solid foundations of ecclesiasti- 
cal polity, they did not forget one of the oldest and 
loveliest concerns of the Church, devotion to art. 

The most noteworthy effect produced by the move- 
ments which we have tried to chronicle as succinctly as 
possible was to bring the Catholic Spirit forward into 
the English world. That light which had taken refuge 



102 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in chapels, in the houses of brave men who suffered 
bitterly for their fidelity, and in a few stray, poverty- 
stricken religious houses, stood over the market place 
again in the sign of a flaming cross. Peter was no 
longer rockbound, and the men who had thought him 
imprisoned discovered his officers on inexplicable parole, 
gaining victories where defeat seemed foredoomed, 
smiling where tears were in the nature of things. The 
literary achievements of the Church's representatives 
conformed with the total unexpectedness of their 
careers. Who would have thought it possible that an 
Archbishop could write like a gifted journalist, or that 
a learned Hebrew scholar should take time to compose 
the moving story of the catacombs? Or, to return for 
a moment to the converts of Oxford, would any 
prophet, taking his stand at the opening of the nine- 
teenth century, have been rash enough to predict that 
within seventy-five years the placid Horatian Univer- 
sity should have come earnestly to stand for its ancient 
motto, and to send forth its most gifted scholars to 
preach the buried beliefs of Catholicism to a listening 
world? 

Catholics do not always realize the splendour of the 
revolution. We find it easier to understand the elu- 
sive soul of Newman, writing itself down in matchless 
prose, and gazing enraptured into star-dim distances, 
the rhythm of whose shadowy going he seems to have 
heard. It is simpler to follow the backward gaze of 
Kenelm Digby, lost on the routes of Christian chivalry, 
forgetful of everything but the silent spires of a broken 
cathedral. After all these men seem more Catholic, 
as they assuredly are more literary; but the men who 



LEADERS AT OXFORD 103 

ventured into the streets wore manly armour, and their 
song was a valiant marching hymn. 



BOOK NOTE 

Those who wish to study the men treated of in this chapter 
should begin with the works mentioned, although certain others 
like Manning's "Religio Viatoris" and Pusey's translation of St. 
Augustine's "Confessions" may in the end prove more interesting. 
Consult the following biographies: of Manning, those by Shane 
Leslie, E. S. Purcell, Dom Gasquet, Wilfrid Meynell, and John 
Oldcastle; of Wiseman, those by Wilfrid Ward and Lord Hough- 
ton ("Monographs") ; of William G. Ward, that by Wilfrid Ward; 
of Faber, that by J. E. Bowden; of Keble, that by Mr. Justice 
Coleridge; of Pusey, that by Liddon; of Father Martineau, that 
by Maisie Ward. Valuable works that treat of the entire period 
are "La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre," by Paul Thureau- 
Dangin; "Fifty Years," by Percy Fitzgerald; and "The Oxford 
Movement," by Dean Church. See also, "Letters of Archbishop 
Ullathorne," edited by A. T. Drane; "Mid- Victorians," by Lytton 
Strachey; "Pusey," by G. W. E. Russell; "Father Faber," by W. 
Hall-Patch; "Gladstone," by John Morley; "Studies in Contem- 
porary Biography," by James Bryce; "Memories," by Kegan Paul; 
"Studies in Poetry and Philosophy," by Shairp. Of interest are 
the various articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Catholic 
Encyclopedia, and the "Cambridge History of English Literature." 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

POETRY AND THREE POETS 
"The best poetry is quite close to us. 



Novalis. 



FOR all the chattering of the anthologist and the 
improved sale of recent verse, poetry is clearly 
not popular. It is no longer common property ; 
there are no troubadours in our village streets and no 
drinking songs in our empty taverns. Democracy's 
persistent attitude towards poetry is that of refusal to 
look at the stars without a telescope; it has concluded 
that the bards are seeing things which do not exist, that 
they are loving the moon for a goddess when she is only 
a corpse. Free verse cannot be said to have helped mat- 
ters much. The value of such experiments is not here 
denied, but their recent modishness was probably due 
to the fact that nobody except the illuminati mistook 
them for poetry. Democratic literary judgment may 
in this instance have been right, although its general 
attitude towards lyric expression has been hopelessly 
wrong. There is more than a difference in form between 
Shakespeare and Masters ; there is a gulf between their 
ways of looking at the world. It is because the older 
poets were near enough to things to be neighbors that 
they wrote kindly, in rhythms that marched and sang. 
Their measure of earth, in so far as they used one, was 

104 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 105 

genially variant; they judged by the homely but living 
standard of the soul's desire. A modern man measures 
things by what they are worth, and therefore by a 
rigidly conventional standard, the principles and limits 
of which have been fixed by society. It may be that 
the modern versifier is free because he, too, is mathe- 
matical; that he no longer obeys metrical law because 
he has adopted the metric system. Perhaps, unwilling 
to be bound by cadences whose origins are mysteriously 
prehistoric, he has sworn allegiance to lines. 

All this is not facetious but symbolic ; the new intel- 
lectual poet has learned too many statistics ever to be 
taken for a fool even by a king. He has called so many 
things illusions that he has forgotten even the spirit 
of the Ludus. It is not altogether his fault. The 
people who to-day scorn all mention of the poets are 
descended from a people who in past ages filled the 
streets with song; the people who scoff at poetry as 
"beyond" them are really beyond the poets. They have 
locked their heavy doors to the sun; with a sudden 
taste for exclusiveness, they have shut out the skylark 
and the sky. Poetry, the simplest, most natural of 
things, is the vision-heritage of the simple. A girl 
whispering to a doll is a poet because she has given 
reality to an image of the real; a boy whose wooden 
sword is the blade of Robert Lee has made, with a. tre- 
mendous gesture, a drama of life and death. In later 
life this creative impulse weakens, as Wordsworth once 
took the trouble to suggest. An elderly gentleman 
cannot by any supreme magic transmute a fellow mor- 
tal into Robin Hood; the best he can do is to reverse 
the process. It is the opinion of every lover that an 
angel has deigned to be worshipped by him; and the 



106 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

aging Dante, on his part, made an angel of her whom 
he had adored. This means very simply that the grown 
poet, the master of words, must have rhyme and reason. 
But there will be in his work, if he is uncramped by an 
industrial education, some of the old natural move- 
ments of the human body : his song will march or leap, 
it will dance or stumble. 

The bard achieved his towering renown in the past 
not because he was a freak of nature but because he 
was popular. He merely did the plain, necessary task 
of song a little better than other people. Then as now 
poets were born and their enemies were unmade, but 
there is a blight on our time. Now as ever the man 
who derides verse is an ungrateful child: he scorns 
his first parents in paradise because he is doomed to 
wear clothes ; he ignores the moon because he is a slave 
to her image in his pocket. And the difference between 
what a man can put into his pocket and what he can 
put into his head is always the difference between 
beauty and material value; that is, between what will 
supply a merely external need and what, without ceas- 
ing its work in the world, will become part of the soul. 
For there exists an ancient and recently endorsed 
theory that man has a soul, that he is not merely the 
child of an ape, but verily the child of God. And the 
wildest hypothesis of the scientific intellect cannot 
conceive of God's being pleased with stocks and bonds 
or piles of metal that were the ashes of His morning 
fire; but the simplest mind will be content with think- 
ing Him happy in the lovely faces of His sons. 

The theme of this sketch, however, is not verse in 
general but Catholic verse in particular. Admittedly 
nobody could be more indifferent to poetry than the 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 107 

average English-speaking Catholic ; but from what has 
been said it may reasonably be inferred that the Catho- 
lic poet has an advantage in being truly a child. He 
has behind him the ancestry of image-makers, and a 
radiant Mother whose care it has been to make of na- 
ture a divine plaything. She has fed the soul with 
Bread and Wine ; she has made a mystic comedy of the 
bitter tragedy of the Cross. Having begun with seven 
sacraments, each of them a towering symbol, she ends 
with illuminating all things, living and dead, with 
grace. With a great and abiding faith she has written 
the baffling difficulties of her creed into the simplest 
of flowers: the rose is mystical and the clover which 
grows by the wayside is a picture of One whom none 
can bear to see. If sometimes her images are fan- 
tastic, it is because her adventure, for high and unut- 
terable stakes, is real enough to be infinitely more 
strange than fiction. Not satisfied with humanizing 
nature, she has mothered it. The poet who is a child 
of Christendom must first of all, then, be a child. 
He must make believe in the awful future; he must 
realize that he is still held in arms. Not always a 
hymn-writer, he knows that there is nothing on earth, 
even among things which had better be forgotten, 
whose image cannot be found in a cathedral. But he 
knows that Satan belongs in hell and not in a palace; 
he avows that the villain must not be defended with a 
sword. Remember, there is in his soul the bliss of 
obedience; you will find him in the "nurseries of 



/ 



It was natural, then, that the revival of the Catholic 
spirit in England should have borne goodly fruit in 
verse, although the break in tradition could not easily 



108 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

be healed. Something has already been suggested con- 
cerning the writers who made occasional poems — men 
like Newman and Faber for whom verse was only an 
aside, like a dream to a soldier. Now we shall greet 
those for whom poetry was the business of life. There 
are many, but at first there come three men whose art 
is not supreme, but who were none the less markedly 
children and children of the Church. Aubrey de Vere, 
constant and calm, found his reflective song in well- 
trimmed gardens ; Gerard Hopkins, strangely solitary, 
was driven by fear to shut out the world from his eyes, 
but when he opened them he beheld earth shimmering 
with lucent rainbows ; and Coventry Patmore, greatest 
among them, perhaps, went from the love that is a 
sacrament to the Love that is beyond vision. But in 
their separate ways they were brothers. 

At first sight it would seem absurd to say that the 
simplicity of nature had any noteworthy relation to 
Coventry Patmore, for he was a quite amazing egoist. 
None of the other Victorians, not even Carlyle, was so 
frankly a cosmos unto himself. Still, when "The Angel 
in the House" appeared in 1858, the world greeted a 
poem which treated the most banal of subjects in the 
most commonplace of meters. That subject was do- 
mestic happiness, and that meter the rhymed octosyl- 
labic quatrain. Anthony Trollope, or Archibald 
Marshall in our day, might have used the incidents in 
the story ; a widower, with three goodly and pious 
daughters, beholds a young poet fall in love with all 
of them at first and finally with one; there is a pretty 
wedding and a subsequent serene family life. Patmore 
never completed the poem, but what was done sinks 
gently back into the languid posture of a decorous age. 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 109 

The immense popularity of the work, similar to that 
which attended Keble's "Christian Year," was, how- 
ever, the result of the high and novel light with which 
the poet illuminated his theme. 

Patmore had boldly made himself the poet of love. 
In his understanding of the influence exerted by a pure 
passion he is more powerful than Hugo; the subtlety 
with which he analyzes, step by step, the attraction 
which two young people come to have for each other 
is matched only in the ancient mediaeval romances. 
But in addition to these matters of psychology, he pos- 
sessed the key to the religion of sex. In the consecra- 
tion of virginity to its fellow and in the alternating as- 
sertion and surrender of each ego, he saw the liturgy of 
a sacrament. Virtue blending with virtue in a kind 
of ethereal sacrifice gains steadily in loftiness ; and love 
which began in the garden achieves, by its mystical 
crucifixion, a resurrection unto the stars. Do the 
modern poets say of marriage that it is the ice into 
which passion finally freezes, the congealing of ecstasy 
into something which a humdrum bourgeois can keep 
in his kitchen? It is because they have made of love 
a convention, says Patmore, and conventions sit fast, 
but the high and constant purity of matrimony is vivi- 
fied by the splendid variety of the soul. And thus the 
imagination of the poet, visioning the things that are 
hidden in the nature of man, defends the noblest and 
oldest of human institutions with ultimate originality. 

This idea, which is Patmore's distinct contribution 
to literature, developed naturally with his character. 
Born in 1846 of an eccentric father, he took a youthful 
interest in science which he seems to have pursued for 
a while with the intensity of a boyish Edison. During 



110 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

this time he prided himself upon being an agnostic; 
but strong instincts, which in Patmore's case always 
overtopped the slower methods of reason, led him safely 
to religion and to love. In his mind the two were closely 
interwoven, and when he came to feel that he could 
write, poetry made the third among his trinity of guid- 
ing stars. His was an ardent, impetuous temperament, 
expressing itself only when the uniform glow with which 
it was suffused sought, spontaneously, a discharge in 
words. Landor, Tennyson, and Rossetti, who be- 
friended his early years, saw Patmore's genius but were 
quite incapable of forming it. "The Angel in the 
House" was the criterion of its author's career: he 
would stand in the midst of men, but he would know 
how to be alone. 

Gradually his insight deepened. Just as he had gone 
swiftly from science to faith, so now he advanced to 
the science of faith. During many years his mystical 
sympathy with Catholic doctrine had drawn him to- 
wards the Church, but the quiet creed of his first wife 
held him in restraint. Some time after her death Pat- 
more journeyed to Rome and engaged in meditative 
study of religious life. For a while he found it im- 
possible to make a submission, but suddenly, in the 
middle of the night, certainty flooded his soul, and with 
characteristic impetuosity he hastened at once to a 
Jesuit house and craved admission to the Church. 
From that day on, not the slightest shadow of religious 
doubt fell across his mind. The engrossing subject 
of the identity of love and religion was taken nip with 
even greater conviction as he found that Catholic mys- 
tics had long proclaimed his doctrine. In the end he be- 
came the seer, beholding the mystery of God's nature 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 111 

and His love in the analogy of human marriage and in 
the never-ending interlacing of force and matter which 
constitutes the world. Treading these high realms of 
vision, he was serenely conscious of the value of his 
mission, and though he was buried in the habit of St. 
Francis, he cannot conceivably be imagined to have 
welcomed "Brother Ass." 

Indeed, the stalwart egoism with which Patmore 
proclaimed his intuitions was the natural complement 
of his thought. Thoroughly honest in his enraptured 
idealism, he viewed with some disgust the lowlier philos- 
ophies about him ; when aroused he attacked with bitter 
anger and his paradoxes were staggering. There is in 
his statement of opinion a great deal of emotional ex- 
aggeration which developed from his extreme love of 
liberty. In politics, to which he devoted much prose 
and even several odes, Patmore was a violent opponent 
of popular government in all its works and pomps; 
very particularly obnoxious to him were such man- 
dates as prohibition, with which democracy threatened 
to bind the individual. Nevertheless, the man who 
could thus work himself almost literally into a towering 
rage was otherwise the most tender of men. Life with 
his first wife, Emily Andrews, was beautiful in its per- 
fect concord; and the second woman of his choice, 
Marianne Byles, was the object of an affection scarcely 
less deep. There lay in his soul the tenderness of tears, 
and his most enduring work is that in which this very 
human and very ordinary quality dares to enter the 
sanctuary of vision. No one in his age quite resembled 
him, for modern society is complex and he was utterly 
simple, with the strong moods and strange ecstasies of 
a hermit during the broken ages of Rome. 



112 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Unless one bears the character of Patmore con- 
stantly in mind, no study of his achievements as a 
Catholic poet will prove satisfactory. The great work 
of his later years is that now generally grouped under 
the title, "The Unknown Eros." In these odes he sang 
of the august analogy between Divine and human love, 
adapting the Pindaric form to the requirements of his 
straightforward emotion and stripping it almost bare 
of poetic language. God, "The Husband of the Heav- 
ens," is the deathless Lover of the Soul, and reverently 
the poet feels 

"This subject loyalty which longs 
For chains and thongs 
Woven of gossamer and adamant, 
To bind me to my unguessed want, 
And so to lie 
Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine 

ether pant 
For hopeless, sweet eternity." 

Its direct analogy is human love, composed of two well- 
suited parts : 

"Your might, Love, makes me weak, 
Your might it is that makes my weakness sweet." 

The surrounding mysteries, those of pain and defeat 
and unrequited longing, are the subjects of Patmore's 
most appealing poems, "A Farewell," "Tristitia," and 
the exquisite "Departure." Love holds the universe 
firmly to its heart: 

"But for compulsion of strong grace, 
The pebble in the road 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 113 

Would straight explode 

And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space." 

And love will in the end make certain that hunger is 
appeased and the heartbreak healed. Browning was 
right when he glorified the fighter for, as Patmore 
saw, 

"The man who, though his fights be all defeats, 
Still fights, 
Enters at last 

The heavenly Jerusalem's rejoicing streets 
With glory more, and more triumphant rites 
Than always-conquering Joshua's when his blast 
The frighted walls of Jericho down cast." 

This is, of course, the poetry of the prophet, even if 
of a very human one. Truths were made known to him 
by meditation achieving insight, and their effectiveness 
depends upon a recognition of their honesty. His are 
moods to which not everyone will obediently succumb; 
but Patmore would have been the last to maintain that 
all should scale the mountain peaks to which he had 
ascended. The "Odes" fail, then, to attain to that 
universality of appeal which the great Catholic lyrics, 
Dies Irae and Te Deum, so securely possess; they fail 
again in being too predominately intellectual and vio- 
lating thereby the inspired mandate of charity. There 
will, however, always be some to whom Patmore's odes 
will speak the very words of Beauty, for whom his 
sublime idealization of love will be the key to life. In 
thus carrying the ideal of "The Angel in the House" 
aloft with his vision, the poet lost somewhat of his 
subtle ability to interpret the lowliest of human ex- 



114 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

periences in words of light. In "Amelia," however, he 
developed a commonplace theme — the feelings of a girl 
who is about to take the place of a dead wife — with a 
deftness, a splendid and perfect sympathy, and a grace 
of fine poetry that are scarcely matched even by the 
masters. The delicate restraint with which the nature 
of a beautiful woman is presented with all its virginal 
purity and power of passion, preserves the morning 
tint of poetry; it is a memory of Paradise. 

The poet's unsteady strength and increasing at- 
traction to direct speech left many things to be said 
in prose. There are keen readers who prefer the slen- 
der epigrammatic volumes — "Religio Poetae"; "Prin- 
ciple in Art"; "Rod, Root, and Flower" — to any of 
Patmore's verse. It may be granted that his mystical 
philosophy is very succinctly set forth in these bril- 
liant essays ; the oracle speaks plainly, if violently, in 
them. No one can ever boil down Patmore's utterances, 
for he gave only the bare quintessence of his thought. 
In general his essays deal with the same themes as those 
which underlie the poems, but undraped as they are of 
poetic symbolism they will strike the average reader 
as outrageous. The humble Christian, staring in- 
credulously at unfathomable paradoxes, is likely to 
mark his copy of "Rod, Root, and Flower" with irate 
question marks. Such cryptic utterances as "Heaven 
becomes very intelligible and attractive when it is dis- 
cerned to be — Woman," need setting forth in the rai- 
ment which the poet alone can supply. In prose Co- 
ventry Patmore the seer becomes a figure as alien from 
these matter-of-fact days as his beloved St. John of 
the Cross. 

His death in 1896 was preceded like that of another 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 115 

master of hard sayings, Huysmans, by much physical 
suffering borne with sublime fortitude. In numerous 
other ways the two men, so different in their attitude 
toward the~native question of sex, were alike. Both saw 
in Woman the central figure, but one beheld her as the 
fount of evil, while for the other she was the image of 
all Good. Together they testify to the power of the 
Church to quench the thirst of intensely original minds, 
to grant that intellectual freedom without which the 
egoist, product of our age, must die. Patmore's mem- 
ory will rest secure on his individuality. It would be 
easy to show that Huysmans' influence on modern lit- 
erature has been very vast, and later on we shall at- 
tempt to make clear that the doctrine for which Pat- 
more lived has also been fruitful in disciples. For all 
his hardness of speech and his limitations as a poet, he 
has proved himself, as Mrs. Meynell says, "the master 
— that is, the owner — of words that, owned by him, 
are unprofaned, are as though they had never been 
profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close 
that it is the voice less of a poet than of the very 
Muse." 1 



II 



Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, poetically tongue-tied 
and chosen for suffering, the world has heard but little 
and that is strangely perverse. The one poet friend 
who appreciated him sufficiently to edit his work failed 
utterly to understand his religious life ; and so Robert 
Bridges' memoir has left the impression of a man hope- 
lessly entangled in fatal asceticism, guilty of an absurd 

^'Rhythm of Life," p. 96. 



116 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

devotion to Mary, and altogether quite despondent. 
From the most famous anecdote concerning him one 
learns that he advised Coventry Patmore to burn the 
manuscript of "Sponsa Dei," thus depriving literature 
of a remarkable essay and Patmore of a crown. Re- 
cently this story, grossly annotated with theological 
"learning," has been repeated in the reminiscences of 
an educator-person whose sole titles to fame are a sec- 
ond-rate decoration from the French government 
(which has made other mistakes) and Patmore's oc- 
casional unwariness in selecting acquaintances. It 
ought not to be necessary to state that Father Hop- 
kins' sole remark was, "That's telling secrets," prob- 
ably a mere reenforcement of the author's own conclu- 
sion. But these matters are curious examples of what 
life meant for Gerard Hopkins — a lovable individual 
whose only possible love was silently religious ; a poet 
who could only lisp in numbers, and a child whom no- 
body could understand. 

The man is too elusive ever to be caught in a por- 
trait. A delicate, brooding youth, alive as few men 
are to the seductive glow of the world, came to Oxford 
and fell in love with Greece. This was his natural 
habitat, coloured with those fiery, unreal skies which 
enraptured Keats and later Rupert Brooke. Hopkins' 
religious intuition, however, shrank quickly from the 
temptress, and following his prayer he was received 
into the Church by Newman. Even so he felt unsafe 
against the teasing stars and made the poet's final re- 
nunciation by joining the Jesuits. There is nothing 
to show that he was misunderstood, but the reward 
of his election was an unremitting pursuit by the demon 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 117 

of ugliness. Never was a man more delicately sensi- 
tive, more keenly responsive to the subtle nuances of 
form; and upon this instrument the world smote with 
the hand of the Cyclops. He went from preaching to 
the classroom at Stonyhurst; thence to the slums of 
Liverpool, and finally to Ireland where, as an ex- 
aminer in the Catholic University, he withered in an 
atmosphere which was, for him, deadly. Father Ger- 
ard Hopkins made his religious sacrifice with the 
stolidity of a soldier; but it was torture as real as the 
martyrdom of Lallement. This brief record of pain 
is all that can be given for a life that began at Strat- 
ford, near London, in 1844, and ended on June 8, 1889. 
His poetry, like his character, is cryptic. Could 
anything be more nobly simple than this youthful song 
of renunciation, come so straight from the heart: 

"Shape nothing, lips ; be lovely dumb. 
It is the shut, the curfew sent 
From there where all surrenders come 
Which only makes you eloquent. 

"Be shelled, eyes, with double dark 
And find the uncreated light: 
This ruck and reel which you remark 
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight." 

But that repression in the end precluded expression; 
having bound himself hand and foot against nature, 
he threw his body amid the thorns of Greek prosody. 
When his penance had been done, he could not extricate 
his art from the coils of a theory which is interesting 
but impossible. In the midst of dicta about running 
rhythm, sprung rhythm, rocking rhythm, and counter- 
point, he stood, a futurist poet before the shrine of 



118 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Mary. Eschewing all the familiar grammatical transi- 
tions, his verse became a sort of verbal pantomime, 
gesture on gesture, ecstatic and arresting very fre- 
quently, but seldom graceful. This method was as- 
sociated with even further oddities such as perplexing 
dialect words and strange JEschylian combinations, 
and a radical departure from the rhythm to which the 
English ear has been attuned. 

Of course there is power in it, as of flashes. Such 
a line as, "Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson 
west" brings with it a glimpse of the true evening sky, 
and one knows not what image of the wild seacoast. 
Motion — which was one of Father Hopkins' fascina- 
tions — is most vividly reproduced in such lines as 
these : 

"Into the snows she sweeps, 
Hurling the haven behind." 

But all these advantages gained from a nearly scien- 
tific exactness in registering impressions are offset by 
utter failures, when the picture is lost in the formula 
and nothing remains but an array of abstruse symbols. 
He is most truly poetic when the emotions which con- 
trol his life govern for a time his response to the dis- 
play of the world. The poem, "The Blessed Virgin 
Compared to the Air We Breathe," is one of those truly 
powerful and fervent Marian hymns in which modern 
literature rivals the old. The sonnets of his last days, 
too, are most poignant outcries of a soul shrouded in 
mystic darkness, bowed and bloody under the lash. 
There are not many more moving lines than this: "I 
wake and feel the feel of dark, not day." The greater 
portion of his slender volume is, however, intellectual 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 119 

verse which is sometimes gifted with power but gener- 
ally lies beyond the boundaries of song. The sonnet 
to "Dun Scotus 5 Oxford" is probably the best among 
this group, but even it is for the very patient reader. 
It was natural, also, that Father Hopkins, whose life 
was a crucifixion and at whom kindly human things 
generally looked from behind strangers' windows, 
should have aspired to be the poet of pain. In "The 
Loss of the Eurydice" and "The Wreck of the Dewtsch- 
lamd" he came very near the sublimity of his favorite 
Greek tragedian, and sang of God the Controller of 
men's wills as no other English poet has done. It is 
interesting to note that his manner here is very much 
like that of a modern German Catholic poet, Annette 
von Droste-Hulsdorff. 

Immediate reaction to the verve of nature and the 
resolution to set that down in words, regardless of en- 
vironment and continuity, are the characteristics of 
Father Hopkins' verse. He was a child enchanted with 
a sunbeam and oblivious of the light which floods the 
world ; he was a master of the phrase but a mere tinker 
at composition. Now these same qualities are so 
strongly manifest in his prose that one cannot refrain 
from setting down an entry from his diary: 

"Sept. 24. First saw the Northern Lights. My 
eye was caught with the beams of light and dark very 
like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a 
cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw 
these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness 
of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating 
thrown out from the line of the earth. Then I saw 
soft pulses of light ; one after another rose and passed 
upwards arched in shape, but waveringly and with the 



120 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the 
warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do, but free 
and concentrical with it. This busy working of nature 
wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go in 
a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days 
and years, but simply as if correcting the preoccupa- 
tion of the world by being preoccupied with and ap- 
pealing to and being dated to the Day of Judgment, 
was like a new witness to God and filled with delightful 
fear." (Dublin Review.) 

That is prose which almost seizes the intangible 
by itself becoming intangible. It is a break, perhaps 
not altogether happy, from the conventions of the 
literary craft; for a counterpart one must visit the 
strabismic art displays of modern painters. 

Are there many who care, or will learn to care, for 
the poetry of Gerard Hopkins? Probably not. It 
seems impossible that poetry should ever follow the 
direction of his teaching, no matter how different its 
form may come to be. He was the elf-child playing 
with the fringe of the sober modern sea, and such chil- 
dren are rare and even unpopular. Certainly he can 
have no place except as the priest-artist who, resolute 
in his search for "Uncreated Light," paused for an 
occasional song before the shrine of the Virgin. As a 
Marian poet, seeking refuge in the arms of the Mother 
from the torment of life, he makes a distinct appeal, 
although the delicate odour of his incense will be lost 
on the crowd of worshippers. As a man he shall go 
down with the mystics and victims of song, with Cam- 
pion and Blake, into the keeping of those who love the 
memory of the luckless dead. He had much to say that 
was left unspoken, but which comes eloquently, none the 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 121 

less, from the sad eyes of the priest who loved the soul 
above all else in the world — his own and his neighbour's 
equally. And what he had lived for was surely not in 
vain. 



Ill 



In contrast with the bold vision and tense mystical 
language of Gerard Hopkins and Coventry Patmore, 
the school of poetry established by Wordsworth read 
nature tranquilly, gravely, in search of "the breath 
and finer spirit of knowledge." Reason, living simply 
beside the stream that washed the roots of aged trees, 
could observe the spiritual background of nature as 
Plato had envisaged it. Poetry was content to walk 
meditatively under the stars and to be transported 
occasionally by the distant horn of Triton. Chief 
among the Wordsworthians was Aubrey de Vere, a 
writer of exquisite mental poise and word-control. He 
tempered the landscape of England with Christian 
moods as no other poet except Keble has tempered it ; 
but it was the ordered landscape of rural England, 
charming in the twilight of memory but safe from the 
storms that raged on England's sea. If he saw any- 
thing else it was Ireland, but he could not have formed 
an idea of an independent Celtic nation. 

This staid Victorianism would have made of Aubrey 
de Vere a mediocre poet had it not been for the one im- 
portant break which he did venture — his conversion 
to the Church. Profoundly moved by the thought of 
Newman, he went with the help of Coleridge and Man- 
ning to Rome and discovered the divine continuity of 
Christendom. De Vere was now able to invest his gar- 



122 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

den with the religious aura of the past; he read back 
into the life of the society which had borne so much 
that was beautiful in saint and virgin. In short, 
though he did not equal Wordsworth in wresting from 
nature the sublime intuition of immortality or the vig- 
orous protest against industrialism which are inherent 
in her, he did surpass him in the sanctification of the 
common shrine. He gave to earth not only personality 
but also personages ; and perhaps it would be well to 
turn aside for a moment to De Vere's own individuality. 
Born in Ireland, January 10, 1814, he was educated 
at Trinity College and at Oxford ; in youth he became 
a disciple of Wordsworth and remained faithful to the 
last by making an annual pilgrimage to the master's 
grave. A gentleman of the rarest personal charm, 
De Vere held the friendship of notable men like Glad- 
stone, was the center of a brilliant society, and the 
idolized poet of people like Kegan Paul. His religious 
fervour had the sweetness as well as the rigour of sin- 
cerity, and his influence on other souls was remark- 
able. A long and hard-working literary career came 
to a close with his death in 1902. 

Being a poet whose literary power lay rather in 
tranquil thought than in any kind of emotion, De Vere 
was not bound to a particular verse form, but used 
them all at will with dignified success. In the epic he 
was least successful, in the sonnet perhaps most genu- 
inely at home. If his dramas are largely forgotten 
now, the "Mary Tudor" has suffered an unkind fate; 
its sheer historical veracity should appeal to the lover 
of the past, and the skill with which the characters are 
made to take life upon the tapestry of the story is not 
so usual in modern poetry. There is power in it, even 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 123 

if that power is sternly reposeful, and a simple gran- 
deur of diction that one must match with something 
earlier than modern romanticism. The classic art, sure 
of itself and guided by philosophic restraint, speaks in 
many fine passages; to such calm poise of feeling the 
modern mind is not addicted, but literature may come 
back to it from erotic exhaustion. 

The various books of lyrics and ballads do not sound 
the peculiar present-day song note. They contain 
verse of much charm, carefully groomed and exact as 
Horace, and of a rare sweetness of religious feeling 
which critics like Professor Saintsbury can only call 
"pretty." Nevertheless they are actually in touch 
with Nature and her soul, for De Vere boldly attempted 
a vision of the two in harmonious union. "Minds re- 
pelled by the thought of a God who stands afar off," 
he said, "and created the universe but to abandon it to 
general laws, fling themselves at the feet of a God made 
man." And though he may have been too weak to bring 
the world to its knees, there can be no doubt that Au- 
brey de Vere himself was kneeling in adoration. He 
felt certain that 

"Some presence veiled, in fields and groves 

That mingles rapture with remorse ; 
Some buried joy beside us moves, 

And thrills the soul with such discourse 
As they, perchance, that wondering pair 

Who to Emmaus bent their way 
Hearing, heard not. Like them our prayer 

We make: 'The night is near us. . . . Stay P " 

Platitudes often have the advantage of being sensible: 
it must still be proved that great art is usually insane. 



124 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

But his reflective description of natural scenery is not 
always devoid of ecstacy, for there are occasional 
flashes of gold and red, and the tranquil vista may 
shimmer with "lucidities of sun-pierced limes." De 
Vere's historical poetry lacks all the fire of an aposto- 
late, is merely reminiscent, Thackerayesque. He found 
that the saints were beautiful in the legendary twilight, 
and drew from them a consolation not hinted at in the 
gorgeous pageantry of Hugo and Scott. As one of 
the first to put the Celtic sagas into English verse, De 
Vere may be regarded, also, as one of the forerunners 
of a most important literary movement, even though 
he succeeded no better than had Pope with Homer. 

In "St. Peter's Chains" he wrote what may be termed 
a sequence of historical sonnets. Of this verse form he 
was truly a master, but the sonnets referred to are 
vastly inferior to the group included in the "Search 
after Proserpine." Here, as in all other good se- 
quences, the poet's philosophy of life is presented in 
a series of carefully wrought miniatures. Of course, 
they are not Shakesperian nor does their art match the 
chiseled perfection of Heredia ; but they are gentle 
vesper lamps, lighted with splendid sympathy for all 
things and thoughts, touched with spiritual refinement. 
"Sorrow," the best perhaps, is only a little inferior 
to "Our Human Life," and the rest are strikingly 
even. Aubrey de Vere was not a master of vision and 
it may be wrong to say that he possessed a single one 
of what are called "great" ideas, with which the mod- 
ern egoist is so bountifully supplied. But he felt sin- 
cerely and courted honourably, "Great thoughts, grave 
thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end." "In every- 
thing that he has written," says Coventry Patmore, 



POETRY AND THREE POETS 125 



"his aim has been grave and high. He has never been 
sectarian even when Catholic." 

Yet Catholic he was in a fine way that did his 
brethren honour. Throughout life he haunted the 
shrines where God had manifested Himself, and studied 
reverently the images of His majesty. He had none 
of the abnormally sensitive responsiveness of Father 
Hopkins, and Patmore's robust and paradoxical state- 
ment of the highest truth was alien to him. May it 
not be said, however, that in many ways he was (and 
is) a better everyday companion, more constant in his 
fervour and less rigorously disdainful of the humble 
things? For all his thorough culture, De Vere was the 
most charitable of men, one of the most self-sacrificing 
of the poets. Those petty jealousies which so often 
disrupt the Muses' coterie touched him not at all; free 
and firm to the end, he came to earn the title of cheva- 
lier of song. Whether his poetry is ever to be more 
popular, whether we shall learn to overlook the ab- 
sence of elan which flattens it so much, are questions 
no one can answer; but of the man it may be said, 
simply, that he was nearly a saint. 



BOOK NOTE 

The complete works of Patmore and De Vere include poems 
and essays. The only edition of Gerard Hopkins' verse is that 
issued with a memoir by Robert Bridges. Note the following 
biographies: of Patmore, by Basil Champneys and Edmund Gosse; 
of De Vere, by Wilfrid Ward. The manifest incompleteness of 
Bridges' estimate of Hopkins is corrected to some extent by a 
series of short essays in the Dublin Review, 1920. The Diary is 
in the possession of Father Keating, S. J. See also, "Idea of 
Coventry Patmore," by Osbert Burdett; "Essays," by Alice Mey- 
nell; "Collected Works," vol. 3, by Joyce Kilmer; "The Poet's 



126 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Chantry," by Katherine Bregy. Paul Claudel's French translation 
of Patmore is interesting. For an enthusiastic estimate of De 
Vere's poetry see "Memories," by Kegan Paul, and the Quarterly 
Review for 1896. Magazine articles on Patmore and De Vere are, 
of course, numerous. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 

FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 
"Look for me in the nurseries of heaven." 

Jk JfERRY ENGLAND, a magazine that bore the 
/l/y interesting device, "We shall try to revive in 
"^ ^ our own hearts and in the hearts of others, 

the enthusiasm of the Christian Faith," was edited by 
a genial and remarkable man. Wilfred Meynell had, 
no doubt, a temperate and gracefully romantic soul, 
but he was fundamentally what he claimed to be, a re- 
vivalist concerned with the nineteenth century and the 
problem of spiritual restoration which Catholics 
thought so intimate a part of it. The excuse for be- 
ginning an essay on Francis Thompson with the name 
of Meynell is simply that without the latter's influence 
there would have been no poet of the "Sister Songs." 
Thompson, it is true, accepted the friendly editor's 
largesse with diffidence and repaid a hundred fold; for 
when on April 18, 1888, the derelict author who had 
been responsible for "Paganism Old and New" tiptoed 
warily into the office of Merry England, that journal 
assumed immortality, though it has long since ceased 
publication. This wretch whose bodily destitution 
could scarcely have been more complete, this wanderer 
of the streets who reeked of laudanum and whose face 

127 



128 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was already set for the death-mask, had indeed in- 
herited the "enthusiasm of the Christian Faith," and 
would do as much to revive it as any other man. 

Mr. Meynell anticipated very little of Thompson's 
story, something of which is now known everywhere. 
Born at Preston, Lancashire, on December 16, 1859, 
Francis was the son of a benevolent doctor whose medi- 
cine had a kindly habit of getting into the hands of 
people who could not pay for it. He and his family 
were sincerely religious converts. It is to be doubted 
whether either father or mother understood at all their 
strange, solitary child. Ought one to expect of earnest, 
workaday parents that they shall immediately divine 
genius in a boy who reads Shakespeare and Scott in 
solitude when not busy at make-believe with his sisters ; 
whose indolence is quite extraordinary ; who, when sent 
to Ushaw (1870) manages somehow to keep himself 
unspotted from the rougher world of boydom, suffer- 
ing meanwhile indescribable agony from affronts to 
which a normal lad would respond with a grimace ; who 
is finally counseled to quell his aspirations to the priest- 
hood because of his "absent-mindedness"? 

The fact is that Francis Thompson was already a 
contemplative, an initiate into the small band of those 
whose intellect bids them sit with Mary, whether the 
final object of their intent be truly God or merely 
nature. But Francis was the disciple of saints, not of 
Walter Pater. It is interesting, though useless, to 
speculate on what would have become of him had the 
spiritual directors of Ushaw, too much concerned with 
the vineyard, guided him to some mystic commuity 
that would have received him with joy. Might not the 
poet have turned saint and have written glowing vol- 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 129 

umes, which would trace for a world so little accus- 
tomed to them the adventures of the lover's pilgrim- 
age? Doubtless the Providence which led him had pre- 
pared the poet's darker night of pain, at the end of 
which would come the poet's ecstacy and the coveted 
release. 

Surely there can be nothing more surprising in fic- 
tion than Francis Thompson's rather indifferent ac- 
quiescence in his father's plans for making a physician 
of him. A man less fitted for wielding the pestle never 
lived. In 1877, however, he entered Owens College, 
Manchester, and began that study of death which, had 
he not already been somewhat aloof from the world, 
must have crushed him. There were, it happens, sev- 
eral doors to freedom: literature, music, and cricket, 
all from the spectator's point of view. During the six 
years spent in Manchester he learned the speech of 
Coleridge and tasted laudanum. Thompson must then 
have fancied himself at the bottom of life, but the down- 
ward movement had only begun. After definitely aban- 
doning the study of medicine and all other practical 
schemes which a patient father could think of, he went 
off alone to London and began on the cobblestones that 
existence of comatose misery which has seemed to most 
persons either terribly romantic or romantically ter- 
rible. It was, of course, neither. The simple fact is 
that Thompson, through no personal fault, had missed 
the vocation after which his nature yearned. This 
dreary waiting for a sign in London, this hunger and 
cold and opium-muddled dreaming, were merely the 
humdrum daily business of one who was an outcast 
from the regal enterprise that had no room for him. 
These things, especially the laudanum, left scars which 



130 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

never healed; but deep battle-wounds seldom do any- 
thing else. 

At length the hand which had led Thompson so 
strangely astray, and as near the abyss as even Saint 
Teresa was allowed to venture, drew him from the 
seething streets to the one place for which he was now 
suited. "Enthusiasm for the Christian Faith" ! What 
had this waif who had 

"Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour 
In night's slow-wheeled car" 

to do with such a venture? Everything. No more 
stalwart crusader, not Richard or Godfrey, had ever 
ridden for the Christian cause than this vagrant trou- 
badour whose body seemed scarcely less material than 
his soul. That at least was firmly knit, had served 
its long campaign. The strength which leaped within 
him, the voice fresh and resonant in an age well used 
to voices, came from seclusion encrusted with the wealth 
of the past : the imagery of the Elizabethan poets, the 
Catholic outlook, the ritual of the Church, and the age- 
long aspect of the firmament and its God. The singer 
was eager for the song, and there came marvelous days 
when melodies formed in the dark opened to the morn- 
ing; when praise seemed void to those who understood 
the music and empty to those who did not. What, in- 
deed, was a lover of his time to make of these verses 
which flaunted it, which spoke a language that only 
forgotten poets understood ? There was disaparage- 
ment enough, excessive neglect. 

Gradually, however, the note of praise increased and 
was sustained. Many a young poet, like Walter de la 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 131 

Mare or Richard le Gallienne, walked the streets obliv- 
ious of everything except the haunting stanzas of 
"The Hound of Heaven." Even the doubting critics 
came to see the genius in their midst and believed, 
though they were sorely tried. Today there is no 
Francis Thompson controversy for the lover of poetry. 
He is "comparable only to Shakespeare," "the greatest 
product of English Catholicism during the nineteenth 
century" — an enthusiastic remark surely — a master 
more adored than Browning or Shelley, and raised to 
a dizzy pinnacle from which only his real emninence 
can prevent a disastrous fall. "Sister Songs" are in 
everybody's hands; there is even a staid American 
scientist who has taken to reading the breviary because 
of certain rhythms in "Sight and Insight." 

It is inevitable that shadows should fall on the pic- 
ture. The poetic heat, repressed so long, could not 
outlive the poet's fragile fire. Thompson stalwartly 
refused to write mediocre poems when his powers were 
inadequate for great ones, and so the bulk of his verse 
is small. There remained, however, many things to 
say, and these he put with great care into prose which, 
less regal than his poetry, remained a faithful com- 
panion until the end. Generally it served the kindly 
office of criticism, and, with the exception of the "Shel- 
ley" has scarcely been recognized for what it is worth. 
The Shelley essay is, of course, a poet's prose at its 
supreme best; but are not the Olympian papers on 
Coleridge, Crashaw, and Landor also among the origi- 
nal, certain literary productions of their kind ? Again, 
Thompson put his entire personality into a life of Saint 
Ignatius Loyola. Surely no one has done, or is likely 
to do, this task with so much understanding and rev- 



132 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

erently fervent art ; nevertheless, it is not very easy to 
get a copy of the book. In short, the fame of the poet 
has made men forget the writer of prose. Thompson's 
genius, so remarkably intuitive and so daringly indi- 
vidual, cannot, however, be understood unless one re- 
members that he began with an essay — "Paganism, Old 
and New" — and ended with a biography — "St. Igna- 
tius Loyola." Since his death no one has doubted the 
inspiration of his poetry ; there is no reason either for 
refusing homage to his prose. 

Extensive critical appreciation of Francis Thomp- 
son's poetry has made quite clear its divergent excel- 
lencies. The impassioned melody following with sur- 
prising ease the curves of a rigidly conceived struc- 
ture (like a group of colored sails on the strong sea) ; 
the vividness of the imagery, intricate and satisfying 
as a ritual ; the vitality of the imagination which shapes 
the poet's idea: all of these good qualities have been 
emphasized. We have learned to accept the most for- 
midable of his Latinisms with some relish, and traces 
of the older poets — Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 
Crashaw — in his verse have been duly pointed out and 
forgiven. The ode structure of the great poems is 
considered a sign of artistic mastery as baffling as is 
Shakespeare's in the triumphant Elizabethan blank 
verse. Interesting studies have been made of the 
method and motive of individual poems — studies which 
are useful, too, because Thompson believed that poetry 
ought to be popular. Neither does anyone doubt the 
authenticity of his vision, although there is often con- 
siderable vagueness about the actual import of that 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 133 

vision. Men are made humble in his presence, and 
Spenser has a rival as the poets' teacher. 

Now such analysis of Thompson's verse as will be at- 
tempted here must necessarily be confined to the general 
attitudes which it assumes. Do the poems permit of 
grouping by reason of some object common to all? It 
would seem very evident that the most striking charac- 
teristic of Thompson's work is its curiously Gothic 
nature — the verve with which it sweeps to airy pin- 
nacles in the dizzy blue of the sky ; the involute and ex- 
haustless imagery, as of crowded friezes, in which its 
dream finds expression; the vital concreteness of the 
execution; and the firm mastery of outline which im- 
presses this otherwise inchoate symbolism into the ser- 
vice of a religious idea. But Thompson was not the 
servant of the past. There was surprisingly little in 
him of the backward glance toward the pageant of 
mediaeval life which fascinated men like Scott or Digby. 
He even took the trouble to state that "the spirit of 
such poems as 'The Making of Viola' and the 'Judge- 
ment in Heaven' is no mere mediaeval imitation, but the 
natural temper of my training in a simple provincial 
home." The fondness he felt for Elizabethan poetry 
was indeed very great; yet this does not signify an in- 
tense visualization of the spirit of Shakespeare's time. 
By comparison, Thompson's interests lay wholly with 
the present and the future. Nevertheless, the Gothic 
spirit was there in all vigour and fulness, and it may be 
said without willfulness that while he did not imitate 
the mediaeval artist, he was that artist, spontaneous 
and individual, reborn in .verse. 

There underlies all of Thompson's poetry the intui- 



134 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tion that the beauty of earth is in some way the reflec- 
tion of the beauty of heaven; earth's beauty fragile 
and soon decayed, material for the constant synthesis 
of birth and death. The Cross is dissolution's presage 
of the Resurrection hope. Thus, in the "Ode to the 
Setting Sun," the poet says: 

"Thou art of Him a type memorial. 
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood 
Upon the Western rood," 

and Christian mysticism advances far beyond the 
idealism of Plato. The "Hound of Heaven," gazing 
from behind His tumultuous windows, knows that the 
man who is temporarily appeased with the mere re- 
flections of His countenance will never remain satis- 
fied, and slowly, steadfastly draws him in. Again, the 
comparison drawn in the "Orient Ode" between day 
and the Benediction service, is a poet's attempt to 
grasp, with nature's help, the mystery of the Incarna- 
tion: 

"O Salutaris Hostia 
Quae coeli pandis ostium, 
Through breached ramparts, a 
Divine assaulter, art thou come" — 

manifests a daring application of exalted liturgy to 
an interpretation of nature. These few examples deal 
with cardinal points ; but the Christian mystic's under- 
standing of the world is upheld everywhere in Thomp- 
son's poetry. 

Now this was exactly the method of the mediaeval 
artist. By means of a highly intricate coordination 
the builder of the Gothic cathedral brought all nature 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 135 

round the table of Divine sacrifice. The mighty pillars 
of the nave, with their clamorous commingling of arches 
and the leaf-like forms of their delicate galleries — 
what were these but the forest rendered mute and im- 
mobile for the sheltering of the Host? Flaming win- 
dows, crowded with figures, reproduced all the colours 
of the sky and ocean illumined by the sun, as these 
saints had been inspired by their Sun. Outside, mar- 
velous groups of statuary gathered virgins and heroes, 
children and labourers, flowers and fruits, and the 
pageants of all seasons under the protecting shadows 
of majestic spires, themselves encrusted with symbolic 
forms. Under all, in the midst of all, there lay the 
Cross, and upon it the Corporal Presence for whose 
sake this monument had been fashioned: real and liv- 
ing, lending all things a new and startling beauty by 
the terrible joy of His marriage of life and death. 

But Francis Thompson was a master of mediaeval 
art as well as of mediaeval doctrine, and his work takes 
on an added beauty when considered in this manner. 
"Sister Songs" are radiant, charming facades, mir- 
acles of spring — with here and there a touch of au- 
tumn — driving up graceful pinnacles into the sky, but, 
though reaching far, never quite attempting the au- 
dacity of a spire. Does not the poet himself say : 

"I faint, I sicken, darkens all my sight, 
As, poised upon this unprevisioned height, 

I lift into its place 
The upmost aery traceried pinnacle. 
So : it is builded, the high tenement, 

— God grant! — to mine intent: 
Most like a palace of the Occident, 

Upthrusting, toppling maze on maze, 



136 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Its mounded blaze, 
And washed by the sunset's rosy waves, 
Whose sea drinks rarer hue from those rare 
walls it laves." 



There is grave, sweet seriousness in his handiwork, 
though occasionally it grows flamboyant, as in the 
riotous "Corymbus for Autumn." Here he is master 
of a maze of imagery that crowds into every available 
place, turning the somber stone of diction into lace 
whose counterpart one must seek at Lincoln or Saint 
Maclou. But the stern outline of the cathedral itself 
has long been drawn and its interior made ready. All 
that stands without, even the "giant arches of the 
years" and the "labyrinthine ways," are not the Beauty 
upon whose service the artist is bent. And kneeling 
in humble prayer before the tabernacle of the "Hound 
of Heaven" he hears the words, 

"Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 
Save Me, save only Me?" 

These are the selfsame words which inspired the mas- 
ter of Gothic stone, who brought together all things 
that make earth goodly as a sign of his relinquishment 
of them to Him. 

Such was the edifice into which Thompson set win- 
dows and placed statues, tender at times, like the 
"Little Jesus ;" again, terrible in aspect, like "The 
Veteran of Heaven," and human finally in the tearful 
image of her of whom he sang in "The House of Sor- 
rows." He celebrated the coming of music and light 
into the temple he had reared, by the "Ode to the Set- 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 137 

ting Sun"; and at the mortuary Mass read there for 
the "Dead Cardinal," he did not forget his own, the 
artist's "Dies Irae" : 

"Good friend, 
I pray thee send 
Some high gold embassage 
To teach my unripe age. 

TeU " 
Lest my feet walk hell." 

Thompson is also the brother of the mediaeval artist 
by reason of his use of imagery. Here there is ques- 
tion not so much of untrammeled imaginative power 
as of the transfiguration of the commonplace. Long 
ago Alice Meynell pointed out one of the secrets of 
Thompson's power — the likening of great things to 
small ones — which the attentive reader will soon dis- 
cover for himself. For example in the "Mistress of 
Vision" we are told: 

"The sun which lit that garden wholly, 
Low and vibrant visible, 
Tempered glory woke; 
And it seemed solely 
Like a silver thurible 
Solemnly swung, slowly, 

Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of 
incense smoke." 

Again, in a simpler poem, "New Year's Chimes," it is 
written : 

"And a world with unapparent strings 
Knits the simulant world of things." 



138 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Mr. Meynell, in the "Life of Francis Thompson," com- 
ments thus upon certain of the poet's analogies : "The 
whole scale of comparisons is unexpected in the case of 
one who goes to the eating-house not only for his meals, 
but for his images; who finds nothing outrageous in 
naming the Milky Way a beaten yolk of stars; who 
takes the setting sun for a bee that stings the west to 
angry red." * Numberless additional examples might 
be given, some of them equally fantastic, others, like 
"the flaming brazen bowl of the burnished sun" sug- 
gestive of the modern impressionist. 

The sole artistic medium able and audacious enough 
to use such imagery unsparingly has been the ritual 
(and architecture) of the Church. In this alone one 
finds the highest and lowliest in that intimate conjunc- 
tion which has been, from the human point of view, 
the motive force in Christendom. The Incarnation 
tells of nothing else, nor does the life and mission of 
the Saviour: it is written in the Magnificat, it is the 
fulfilment of the Domine, non sum dignus. Christ, in 
the parables, lent dignity to infinitesimal things like 
mustard seed. And just as the ritualist who first con- 
ceived the idea of representing Jesus by means of the 
wax candle, or the sculptor who in the dim regions of 
the catacombs modeled Him as a Fish carrying a bas- 
ket of Bread through the waters, did so with all rever- 
ence and love, so our derelict poet fashioned for him- 
self a comforting vision of heaven from the things he 
trod under his feet. With a surprising buoyancy of 
spirit he loved the dreams he drew, and if sometimes 
they closed in pain he knew that the artist must suffer, 

1 Chap. X, page 207. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 139 

like St. Jerome or St. Monica, in expiation for the 
ugliness of the world. 

The house of worship built, Thompson follows the 
guidance of Coventry Patmore, his friend, and is 
wrapped in mystical contemplation before the throne 
of God: the shadows thicken and the One Light burns 
in the midst of that universe of images ; there descends 
upon the meditative worshipper "Sight and Insight," 
the end, the desideratum, the goal of mediaeval art. 
In this immaterial raiment the soul might best sever 
itself from the body, throw aside the train of the beauty 
of Earth. It is not pretended, of course, that Thomp- 
son consciously made any such disposition of his poetic 
faculties as has been suggested here; that it was made, 
however, in a marvelously complete way, that he did 
become the counterpart of the builder in the Ages of 
Faith, seems both evident and remarkable. He was 
the Gothic artist in verse, and two things are thereby 
made clear: that God did not disdain the services of 
one who was naturally a priest and a contemplative, 
but gave him the boon of an exalted mission as "the 
poet of the return to God," and that, in the ordinary 
sense, he had not sinned against the Light, but kept 
his soul bright as it had been in boyhood. 

It is not easy, when one has reviewed the excellencies 
of Francis Thompson's poetry, to have patience for an 
examination of his short-comings. That his work was 
not free from faults is a platitude; but as Mr. John 
Macy, a critic quite different in temperament from his 
poet, suggests, they are always the sins of a Meister- 
singer. Elizabethan conceits are not always charming, 
and those in several poems, especially "Manus Animam 



140 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Pinxit," show clearly a lack of inspiration. In cer- 
tain stanzas of even the best poems the thought is spun 
out almost into thin air, grammatical constructions 
are mismanaged, and words too exclusively poetic 
usurp, for the mere sake of melody, the rightful places 
of homelier terms. It requires no master of the art 
to detect the flaw in such lines as these : 

"The burning rhetoric, quenchless oratory, 
Of the magniloquent and all-suasive sky,'* 

when Thompson writes them; but they might serve 
lesser poets well. On the whole he proved a very con- 
scientious workman, and the mystery of his rhythmic 
patterns will baffle all imitation not deeply erudite. 
The eager pilfering which Thompson graciously con- 
fessed was, of course, Shakespeare's privilege; but the 
suspicion that "the great earthquaking sunrise clang- 
ing past Cathay'' is derived from Mr. Kipling, or that 
the Edinburgh reviewer of 1895 was right in finding 
traces of Cowley in "Sister Songs" does prove some- 
what disconcerting. These blemishes and all others 
that may be cited do not, however, mar the supreme 
originality, the regal beauty, and the spiritual ecstasy 
of Francis Thompson's verse. He was the master- 
builder of song; among all the poets of later years, he 
is the one who guarded best the citadel of the soul. 

The poet that Francis Thompson so magnificently 
proved himself to be left plenty of room for the hum- 
bler writer of prose. When the temple of his song 
had been built, during one brief, intensely creative 
period of power, the master grew weary and could no 
longer venture on the spires, among the bells. Dreams 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 141 

remained kind, but gradually became elusive guests. 
With prose Thompson felt at home always ; the critic's 
hand is somehow firmer than the poet's, though it need 
not lack almost equal delicacy and strength. "Pagan- 
ism, Old and New," which rescued him from the dark- 
ness, is Thompson's measure both as a writer and as 
an individual. It is quaint, semi-poetic, and despite 
its oddities, oddly powerful; but it bears the imprint 
of a strangely simple man. His mind was made up: 
he knew the story of the continuity of Christendom, 
and understood how fully it had drawn from the older 
Paganism which is dead forever. "Aurora may rise 
over our cities, but she has forgotten how to blush": 
the derelict who wrote thus had already come into his 
kingdom, and all that earth could give was the wreath 
for the brow of Her he craved. In later years his 
mysticism grew stronger, and he sharpened his wits 
on the golden sands of love. Essays and book reviews 
caught something of his thought, which disregarded 
occasionally the paths in which it strayed. At the 
end there came the "St. Ignatius Loyola," surely a 
noble tribute in which there is as much of the real 
Francis Thompson as one can find in "The Hound of 
Heaven." 

His greatest achievement as a prose-writer is, of 
course, the "Shelley." It is not only an apology for 
that wayward poet, but also a defense of song. Thomp- 
son, pausing for a moment at the white heat of his 
own creative energy, rides to the rescue of a younger 
brother, gorgeous in the armour of regal imagery. 
Was insight in its highest intuitive form ever so thor- 
oughly alive under jeweled garments of state? It is 
Shelley who keeps the tryst by the eternal proxy of 



142 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

genius ; Shelley the audacious, the absurd, the spoiled 
poet, but after all, Shelley the boy. Or has Thompson 
made a tomb of prose in which the singer shall live — 
a tomb of filigree marble rising from a floor of rich 
encaustic tile, delicately wrought, vibrant in every 
detail, surely the despair of the pedant? 

"Coming to Shelley's poetry," says Thompson, "we 
peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, 
and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none 
of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian 
than 'The Cloud,' and it is interesting to note how 
essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. 
The same thing is conspicuous, throughout his singing ; 
it is the child's faculty of make believe raised to the nth 
power. He is still at play, save only that his play- 
things are those which the gods give their children. 
The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his ringers 
in the day-fall. He is gold dusty with tumblings 
amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the 
moon. The meteors muzzle their noses in his hand. 
He teases into growling the kenneled thunder, and 
laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances 
in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered 
with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields 
of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets be- 
tween the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in 
the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened 
tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she 
will look nicest in his song." * 

Some reasonable objection might be made to the 
metrical strain of this prose ; but the most noteworthy 
quality in Thompson's criticism is not the rhymthic 
verve of the language or its pell-mell imagery, but its 

1 Pp. 39-41. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 143 

shrewd knowledge of mechanics and no less uncanny 
divination of artistic motives. The critic's sight be- 
comes a divining-rod poised over depths unsuspected 
before. Thompson was not always able to find the 
vein of gold, nor was his assaying infallible. But there 
is little poetic criticism in nineteenth century English 
literature to equal his. If one takes, for example, the 
temperately written "Crashaw," wherein admiration 
for the master is curbed by the disciple's inspection of 
his workmanship, one feels that here a mason is busy 
studying the mortar of a sturdy old wall. Crashaw 
had spoken, for instance, of the "curved" snowflakes; 
Thompson was perhaps the only modern to note the 
actual "curve" which had fascinated the older poet. 
Coleridge, so much of genius bound and gagged, is thus 
summed up : "the poet submerged and feebly struggling 
in opium-darkened oceans of German philosophy, amid 
which he finally floundered, striving to the last to fish 
up gigantic projects from the bottom of a half -daily 
pint of laudanum." What most readers have sensed 
in reading Milton, but few have known how to express 
is thus succinctly stated by Thompson : "Milton lacked, 
perhaps ... a little poetic poverty of soul, a little 
detachment from his artistic richness. He could not 
forget, nor can we forget, that he was Milton." This 
is the consistent tenor of his criticism, which is always 
journalistic but never feeble or flitting; it is "creative" 
criticism, if you will, though not impressionistic in 
manner. For Thompson knows and obeys the canons 
of taste; his outlook upon literature is Elizabethan, 
and therefore warmly classical, while the windows of 
his judgment are face to face with nature gorgeous in 
spring. At the bottom of his driven mind lies the pearl 



144 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of humour, beyond price. "This is commendable 
neither in poet nor errand-boy," says the "Shelley" 
with a twinkle not of this age, but gracious as Beau- 
mont. 

Most important among Thompson's qualities, how- 
ever, was the seer's hearkening to the heart-beat of 
Truth, the mystic's reading of a manifold script writ- 
ten to spell out the Word. He knew when to shut his 
eyes. As Patmore says in "Aurea Dicta," "Lovers 
put out the candles and draw the curtains, when they 
wish to see the goddess ; and in the high Communion, 
the night of thought is the light of perception." The 
ordinary reasoning process counts for little in Thomp- 
son's mental operations; instead there is the flash of 
understanding traversing the distance between the 
outer world and its Core with a stately ease that must 
be purchased with pain. He served the two queens, 
Beauty and Truth, with his life. Of prose and poetry 
he made a continuous homage aux dames. This was a 
privilege inherited from the saints who, in paying 
tribute to God, have loved His vesture. From time 
immemorial, indeed, the idea that nature is a veil has 
been the inspiration of both poetry and thought. For 
Thompson, Coleridge had spoken truly: "Absolute na- 
ture lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives 
in the life of God; and in so far, and so far merely, 
as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sym- 
pathy with Nature; and Nature with him. She is 
God's daughter who stretches her hand only to her 
father's friends." Later there came from Patmore 
the teaching of the universal sacrament of union, the 
sublime harmony of the Trinity envisaging itself in 
all the world's diversified conjugation, especially in 



FRANCIS THOMPSON THE MASTER 145 

matrimony. It was not given to Thompson to become 
so rapturously certain of this doctrine as his master 
was, nor had he any deep knowledge of woman. The 
whole of this exalted, unearthly teaching is controlled 
by a reverent observation of the disciplina arcani; this 
Thompson realized, and though it was part of his 
inspiration he would not have cared, perhaps, to have 
it publicly insisted on. 

What shall we make in the end of this man who knew 
so little of the world's ways and yet understood it so 
well? His character was fascinatingly simple and 
though crowded with pain escaped moroseness. In 
reality one thinks of it as pervaded with penitential 
peace; his life is like a procession through bitter and 
suffering streets, dark with things that one sees in 
laudanum dreams, to the house of laughter. Thomp- 
son had wedded Poverty when she was no longer a lady, 
but the child was most beautiful song. Who can 
analyze a soul so patient, so reverent, so governed by 
the best instincts of childhood; a soul which lacked 
utterly the complexities which arise in a nature dis- 
turbed by the grapple of evil with good ; a soul proudly 
conscious of its powers and lineage even in the throes 
of despair? The man who had not been vouchsafed 
the earlier priesthood, fulfilled the later ministry with 
quiet pomp. During the time of his visits at Panta- 
saph, where the Franciscans received him amiably, he 
indulged to the full that longing for monastic retreat 
with which he had been marked at birth; if in other 
surroundings he gratified the more ordinary desire for 
companionship, it was because kindness would repay 
charity. The laudanum which seems to stain his fin- 



146 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

gers, if not his soul, was after all the terrible key with 
which he could enter solitude when all other doors were 
closed. 

There is no room here for mention of his personal 
peculiarities, which are all to be had for the asking 
from his biographer. The portrait which Lytton drew 
shortly before Thompson's death on November 13, 
1907, is that of a prophet, visualizing "the dread future 
without dread"; so that after all he had nothing to 
regret in the manner of his life. As for his poetry, 
that is cere perermius. 



BOOK NOTE 

The Standard (Scribner) Edition of Francis Thompson's poetry 
and prose in three volumes is the desirable one. The Modern 
Library (Boni and Liveright) contains the "Poems" in convenient 
form. "The Life of Francis Thompson, ' by Everard Meynell, is 
the authoritative biography. See in addition, "Francis Thompson," 
by G. E. Beacock; "The Spirit of Francis Thompson," by a Sister 
of Notre Dame; "The Hound of Heaven," by F. P. LeBuffe, S. J.; 
and the "Shelbourne Essays," 7th Series, by P. E. More. A study 
of Thompson's prose has been prepared by Charles L. O'Donnell. 
The following essays in the Dublin Review are of interest: by 
A. C. Cock, vol. 149 ; by Alice Meynell, vol. 153 ; by William Barry, 
vol. 147. See also, Joyce Kilmer, "Works," vol. 3. 



CHAPTER NINE 



INHERITORS 



"Pinguescent speciosa deserti." 

Psalm 64. 



POETRY is not only natural but also as universal 
as nature. While every truly poetic era listens 
to masters, it welcomes minstrels as well — wan- 
dering minstrels who sing in chorus and are often 
forgotten before the applause has died away, but who 
bring something quite like sunshine into the streets 
through which they pass. Of course, there is really 
no such being as a minor poet ; one might speak as in- 
telligently of minor sunsets or major mornings. Not 
all, however, are ample and gorgeous, mastering the 
heavens and the earth, and some are even the children 
of an hour, dispensing swiftly the beauty which is their 
secret treasure, and disappearing for evermore into 
the mute and obscure poverty which rewards their giv- 
ing. The fact to be noted is that the priceless things 
in literature are not always signed with resounding 
names. There are lyrics by humbler poets from Catul- 
lus to Donne and Dobell that are as fragrant as any 
rose in Shakespeare's garden ; we should rather have 
the "Dies Irae" than "Paradise Lost." And among 
the matchless psalms of David there is none to equal 
the Magnificat, 

147 



148 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It is very much the same, of course, with the other 
arts. The little town of Thann, in Alsace, has a 
church which, when everything has been said, is rather 
simple. But adorning the facade, on the slenderest 
of columns, stands a statue of the Madonna, the work 
of some utterly forgotten fourteenth century artist. 
There is in this representation of the Mother and Son 
that ultimate originality which endows the dream of the 
artist with the vision and vitality of the people to whom 
he belongs. Here is a Virgin whom everybody instinc- 
tively recognizes for a Mother, and a Child whose love- 
liness seems too real, too blissful, for stone. And per- 
haps it would be better to make a pilgrimage to Thann, 
of which the world knows little, than to visit the towers 
of Cologne or even St. Paul's in London, for all its 
Renaissance majesty. 

To return to poetry, let us give thanks that the 
Catholic Spirit has been enshrined in songs beyond 
number. There are many poets with whom this nar- 
rative cannot deal, although it is true that neither 
Browning nor Meredith, Tennyson nor Arnold, were 
uninfluenced by the revival of Christendom; in multi- 
tudinous and separate ways they bore testimony to the 
beauty which is the garment of God. But the glory 
of these men is to have reflected the spirit of the mod- 
ern age, to have caught its optimism or its quandary, 
its aspiration or its despair. The Catholic poet, al- 
though alive to the rhythm of the surrounding time, is 
necessarily a mediaevalist at heart, for the moderns 
believe in God and also in If, but the Middle Ages were 
conscious of Him, simply, as a fact. Herein lies all 
the difference in the world, but chiefly it is the difference 



INHERITORS 149 

between deference to the tables of science and to the 
tables of the Law. "Every artist," says Ernest Hello, 
"should live in austere conformity to Order," and cer- 
tainly this is a golden rule. But the Church has not 
been a principle, but a mother, and has marshalled men 
not as soldiers but as future citizens ; she has said to 
man and poet, "Go your own way, but remember the 
household into which you are born." Nothing is more 
remarkable in the writers whom we shall consider than 
the diversity of their temperaments and their likeness 
in the consciousness of their heritage. 

Alice Meynell, the first of these poets, belongs un- 
questionably among the number of the immortals. She 
is, moreover, the earliest literary woman to take an 
active part in the revival of the Catholic Spirit. The 
feminine mind, from the days of Sappho, has brought 
to letters qualities of gold — intimacy, restraint, deli- 
cacy of emotion — and immortal women, Mme. de 
Sevigne, Jane Austen, St. Teresa, have written with 
something akin to the virtue of silence. The defense 
of the shrine of womanhood lies, it is evident, in the 
poise of reserve, in the attitude which stands half way 
between repulsion and embrace. Mrs. Meynell, under- 
standing this principle well, has written with a mag- 
nificent tranquillity that might have been the mood of 
Venus de Milo were it not for a subtler shadowing of 
the flesh, a more resolute devotion to spirit in its pure 
form. She writes, like Emerson, prose and poetry re- 
markably similar in character, each distinguished by 
fine humorous intelligence and the chaste rhythm of 
secluded feeling. How it is that in this modern age 
woman should keep best that high Stoicism of charac- 



150 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ter, that classic frigidity of expression, which belonged 
to Sophocles and Joubert, we shall not attempt to 
explain. 

The first slender volume of poems, "Preludes," has 
been followed by other collections just as fragile and 
spare. There is scarcely a line that lacks the ultimate 
touch, that Mrs. Meynell might conceivably have done 
better. All the poems are ideas, visions, and prayers ; 
but none of them could conceivably be quoted either in 
Parliament or in church. And here is at once the 
secret of Alice Meynell's power and of her limitation; 
she goes infallibly to the reason of things, but seldom, 
if ever, to the heart of things. There is no Rachael 
mourning for her children and no Magdalen drying the 
Saviour's feet with strands of golden hair. In her 
verse you meet always the marble figure with the heart- 
beat in the eyes alone, the poignant cry that is never 
uttered except in a gaze. "Renunciation" is such a 
poem, "Maternity" another: 

"Ten years ago was born in pain, 
A child, not now forlorn. 
But, oh, ten years ago, in vain, 
A mother, a mother was born." 



But it is thus that the ideal woman of the ages, not 
La Giaconda but Mary of the Stabat Mater, has 
spoken to the hearts of men. And if Mrs. Meynell's 
emotions are thus carefully repressed for the show 
they must make in words, her prayer is no less closely 
shrouded. Sometimes the comparatively simple vision 
is put with utter simplicity: 



INHERITORS 151 

"For no divine 
Intelligence or art, or fire, or wine 
Is high-delirious as that rising lark — 
The child's soul and its daybreak in the dark." 

Again, the insight into remoter things is clouded with 
its own remoteness, though the naked lines speak every- 
thing that can be said. Such a poem as "A General 
Communion" is pure idea kindled by an almost incom- 
municable spiritual ecstasy : 

"I saw the people as a field of flowers, 
Each grown at such a price 
The sum of unimaginable powers 
Did no more than suffice." 

This poetry can be the product only of a mind both 
remarkably original and remarkably disciplined. By 
necessity Mrs. Meynell was driven to have her say on 
life, and while this declaration is very forcefully made 
in poems like "The Fugitive," it is really the business 
of her prose. In three surprisingly even series of 
essays, "The Rhythm of Life," "The Colour of Life," 
and "Hearts of Controversy," she manages to suggest 
her own firmly balanced intellectual position while 
piercing to the rotten core of everything that smacks 
of decivilization. Her ideal is self control and de- 
cidedly not the modern business of self expression. A 
good deal of subtly restrained opinion is devoted, natu- 
rally, to a consideration of art, for Mrs. Meynell is 
always primarily the artist. She has made of the short 
prose essay a medium as perfect in form, as responsive 
to the intimacies of sensibility, as the Epistles of 



152 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Horace. It is to be expected that such treatment of 
life will sometimes taste bitter in the mouth, or seem 
trop raffine pour ce monde. Neither the prose nor the 
poetry of Alice Meynell has been written for the multi- 
tude; she has courageously elected to say a word to 
the teachers and to characterize the gaudiness of con- 
temporary romantic philosophy with the withering ad- 
jectives it invites. But in her own way she has also 
been the oracle of consummate womanhood, of mothers 
whose maternity has only made them graver children 
of the divine. It is, of course, unsafe to venture an 
estimate of Mrs. Meynell's ultimate literary position; 
but there is no other English writer now living whose 
work seems so safe from time. 

No poet could offer a greater contrast to the refined 
sexlessness — feminine insight manfully controlled — of 
Alice Meynell than the rugged, masculine verse of Wil- 
frid Scawen Blunt. This man of genius, whose career 
has been so varied and so impetuous, is perhaps the 
only modern whom Richard of the Lion Heart would 
have welcomed for a brother. Both have been men of 
action with a turn for song; they might have ridden 
out together to the ends of the earth, championing the 
oppressed almost singlehanded, and come out of the 
desert shoulder to shoulder, hating the Moslem. Both, 
in short, have made a knight's homage to the dreams 
that pulse through the heart of the world. Wilfrid 
Blunt, at eighteen, was a member of the diplomatic 
corps ; at twenty-nine he married and began with his 
wife a series of exhilarating though dangerous jour- 
neys across Spain — then the scene of a Carlist revolt — 
Algiers, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Some of his adven- 
tures gained the attention of Britain and upon return- 



INHERITORS 153 

ing home Blunt wrote a series of essays on England's 
policy of outrage in Egypt and India. Not content 
with this anti-imperialistic mission, he warmly espoused 
the cause of Ireland and in 1887 was cast into prison 
for having taken part in a prohibited meeting at Wood- 
ford, Galway. "Whoever writes the lining of English 
history," says Shane Leslie, "must consult the little- 
known monographs of Wilfrid Blunt criticising Eng- 
land's rule in Ireland, Egypt, and India." 

If all this is not of itself very poetic, it will suggest 
very clearly the kind of verse to which Wilfrid Scawen 
Blunt affixed his name. Most of his best work is to be 
found in "Love Sonnets of Proteus" and "Seven Golden 
Odes of Arabia," a series of translations done with the 
assistance of his wife. They are songs distinctive of 
the man of action, impatient of cloying colour, con- 
ventions of form, and subtlety, but they are instead 
direct, genuine, and surprisingly virile. The individu- 
ality of the man is further shown by his quixotic choice 
of the sonnet form, which he employs, however, with 
more than Shakesperian modifications ; but that is after 
all the man's way, and it is the sentimentalist like 
Walt Whitman who betrays his weakness by running 
wildly over the page. Here is a sextet from a love- 
sonnet, "St. Valentine's Day," to show the vigorous 
chafing of his muse: 



"I knew the spring was come. I knew it even 
Better than all by this, that through my chase 
In bush and stone and hill and sea and heaven 
I seem'd to see and follow still your face. 
Your face my quarry was. For it I rode, 
My horse a thing of wings, myself a god." 



154 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

That Wilfrid Blunt is a genuine Englishman, de- 
spite his political opinions, the fine sonnet on "Gibral- 
tar" will suffice to show: but he is the Englishman of 
an age now almost forgotten — the age before industry, 
when man was free as the hills he roamed, and when 
chivalry was constant in its service of the star. In 
many ways he has been a Stevenson whose craving has 
been appeased, whose hunger for the wild paths around 
the world has sought its fill in more substantial things 
than sonorous sentences. Blunt's poetry is too much 
the expression of his independent character to become 
popular in these days of aesthetic rhythms and care- 
fully groomed ideas. His definite intellectual position 
is, of course, not due to his breaking of the conventions, 
nor did he utter paragraphs of nonsense from the phi- 
losophy of Rousseau. He has not been a radical but 
a spectre — something that in the older days was more 
plentiful and deserves in these the almost obsolete title 
of "man." 

From the rugged manliness of Wilfrid Blunt one 
goes, with a sense of fitness, to the delicately feminine 
charm of Louise Imogen Guiney. Although she was 
the poet of a few in days when no poetry addressed 
itself to many, she has been remembered since her death 
with an affectionate admiration to which only the 
finest, most genial spirits have a right. Her verses 
were flowers and she, perhaps, was fairer than any of 
them — a woman of the morning, with a taste for the 
beautiful ages. Born in Massachusetts and educated 
nearby, Miss Guiney came to feel "the love of man 
which calleth overseas, and from towers afar off." 
The later years of her life were spent with modest 



INHERITORS 155 

grace at Oxford, where as "a mere mole of the en- 
chanted Bodleian" she stained her fingers with the lore 
of Christendom. Memories of the Catholic past grew 
real under her eyes, and she whom the beauty of life 
had stirred to song knew also the silent beauty of 
death. She was of straight American descent, of 
course; but we have placed her among the English 
poets because that seems to have been her election. 

The bulk of Miss Guiney's work was done in prose 
of a vibrant, intimate texture that rivals the earlier 
mastery of Mme. de Sevigne. Perhaps it was her Irish 
blood, or perhaps it was destiny, that made her write 
so well in the best manner of the French. Her prose 
is not so perfect as Mrs. Meynell's, but it is more 
responsive, less didactic, more tenderly human. There 
are passages to which the heart answers directly, and 
the refinement of them is like a subtle natural perfume. 
"Patrins," a book of crisp personal essays, is probably 
the most familiar, but it seems that if any work of hers 
is worthy of immortality it is "Monsieur Henri." This 
"Foot-note to French History" is the gay and poig- 
nant story of Rochejaquelin. His was a character to 
which Miss Guiney's nature called out in answer: his 
chivalry, gentleness, and bravoure were her own. One 
feels that the book, small and exquisite though it may 
be, is full of regulated virility. The words move with 
the symmetry of noble speech and sparkle with the 
gladness of youth. "Stress must be laid," says the 
author, "upon heroes ; they are the universal premise" : 
and her emphasis is unforgettable. Beside the fine 
grace of this book, Ruskin is ponderous and Howells a 
mere bludgeoner ; it is not given to men to write thus. 



156 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Yet, though this is her best work, there is art for the 
most critical in "Goosequill Papers," in the Memoir 
of Hurrell Froude, in everything she did. 

As a poet Louise Imogen Guiney wrote what her 
heart dictated and no more. It is to be regretted that 
she could not leave a half-dozen portly volumes rather 
than one slight book; but that is a sheaf heavy with 
grain and gold. The cheerful audacity with which she 
faced life was characteristic to the end, but appears 
brightest, perhaps, in the ballads : 

"Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to 
the saddle, 
Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn, 

galloping legion, 
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that 
loves him." 

Yet, though the smile was bright, tears stood close by 
with something of the sweet Celtic melancholy in them, 

"The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill, 
And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still. 
But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, 
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!" 

Then, best of all there was the loyalty to Faith that 
warmed her inner life, expressing itself with veiled 
reticence and yet appealingly. No woman could have 
been less an Amazon, and still her religious verse throbs 
with pain met and overborne, with the victorious peace 
of prayer. Knowing when to bow her head, she met 
life sternly though in tears, mindful of the beauty 
which is hidden by the thorny hedge. Perhaps she said 



INHERITORS 157 

all these things best in that perfect poem, "Beati Mor- 
tui," written for those 

"Who out of wrong 
Run forth with laughter and a broken thong; 
Who win from pain their strange and flawless grant 
Of peace anticipant; 

Who cerements lately wore of sin, but now, 
Unbound from foot to brow, 
Gleam in and out of cities, beautiful 
As sun-born colours of a forest pool 
Where autumn sees 
The splash of walnuts from her thinning trees." 

From Miss Guiney's virginal presence one goes 
gladly and with a sense of fitness to a boy whose short 
life was busy with stealthy verses made in homage to 
the loveliness of God. Digby Dolben, dead at nineteen, 
was already a poet, leaving verse that is remarkably 
mature. Handsome of body and soul, carefully edu- 
cated and blessed with a radiant disposition, his soul 
consecrated itself to religion with a kind of abandon. 
Unaided he entertained a vision of the Church which 
alone possesses the Reality, and sought to grope his 
way. Death overtook him before he had entered the 
gate, chiefly because family opposition had made delay 
necessary. Dolben's poetry is a series of tributes to 
the things of faith, together with examinations of con- 
science before the Lord whom he dared not confess. 
There is pure melody in his lyrics and wide knowledge 
of the invisible world : is it a boy, one asks, who writes 
the "Shrine" or "Sister Death"? But wonder in- 
creases to the point of amazement with the reading of 
"Dum Agonizatur Anima," a poignant confession of 



158 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

religious irresolution, of weakness, and of hope, done 
in the manner of Newman's "Gerontius." 

"And we who follow in His martyr train 
Have access only through the courts of pain, 
Yet on the Via Dolorosa He 
Precedes us with His sweet Humanity." 

Two months after laying aside this impressive but 
unfinished revelation, Digby Dolben fainted while swim- 
ming and all that he might have been ceased to be. 
But there had come into his story a kindly fulness from 
the mothering shadow of the Church. 

Let us go back for a moment to the memory of Adel- 
aide Proctor, the eldest daughter of "Barry Cornwall." 
Her verse lacks the artistry, the inner glow, of great 
poetry, but strikes a simple chord to which the humbler 
mind instinctively responds. "Legends and Lyrics," 
the best of Miss Proctor's work, has shared the great 
popularity of Longfellow; and such poems as "A Lost 
Chord," "Thankfulness," and "A Legend of Provence" 
were known to a whole generation of the poor. It is 
easy to scoff at the fluent rhythm, the commonplace 
ideas and the general didacticism of such verse, but it 
is impossible to deny that it sprang sincerely from the 
sincerest of lives. Adelaide Proctor found her way 
into the Church without any desperate effort. "She 
was," said her admirer, Charles Dickens, "a finely sym- 
pathetic woman with a great accordant heart and a 
sterling noble nature." Having given her life wholly 
to the service of the unfortunate, she died from the 
strain of devoted overwork. Certainly she understood 
the songs of the modern poor, for whom 



INHERITORS 159 

"The Past and the Future are nothing 
In the face of the stern today," 

better than any mere intellectual can hope to. If this 
be the only reason for keeping her memory green, it is, 
at least, a reason. 

One passes naturally from a life so austerely given 
to charity to the blasted careers of those poets who 
came out of the darkness of decadence into the Church 
for the warding off of final despair. She who for two 
thousand years has busied herself with the sins of men 
did not disdain to aid these at the last, although they 
could give Her no service in return. There is a shred 
of Catholic tradition in the work of Oscar Wilde, but 
it is a soiled shred, polluted with that touch of moral 
leprosy which the brilliant debauchee left an imprint 
of on everything that came into his life. Even "De 
Profundis," probably a sincere effort to write sincerely 
of the soul, has somehow the odour of medicaments. 
The career of Ernest Dowson, who retarded his con- 
version until a life of indulgence had sentenced him 
irretrievably to an early death, did write poetry which 
is touching as a recognition of the mercy of God. 
"Extreme Unction" is a Catholic poem, but its inspira- 
tion is the grave. Like Aubrey Beardsley and so many 
of the French decadents, these geniuses, unbalanced by 
the sickly caste of modern matter-worship, came at last 
to the foot of the Scarlet Hill. It is something that 
the Catholic Spirit, which could not save their lives, 
did heal their souls. The entry into the Church of 
Lord Alfred Douglas, at one time intimately associated 
with Wilde, did not altogether calm the spirit of this 
recklessly impetuous man. A journalist virulent in 



160 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his defense of conservative government, Douglas is a 
master of the sonnet. His poems, while not so abstract 
in inspiration, have the finish and verbal brilliancy of 
Santayana. 

With an ancestry so varied and in general so dis- 
tinctly regal, the future of the Catholic poetry in Eng- 
land cannot fail to be beautiful. It is natural, how- 
ever, that this new age should bring changes in attitude 
and method — this age so restless in spirit, so raucous 
in its expression of discontent, and so fiercely wounded, 
too, in its martyrdom. The cry is for facts in the 
midst of delirious laughter; for dogma (covertly) in 
the clutches of despair. It is not true that the Vic- 
torians despised truth (shades of Newman and Car- 
lyle !) but that what they knew of it was still consid- 
ered effective. The modern man clamours for the 
naked truth and expects to see it shivering and impo- 
tent; and so, what he really admires is the half-truth, 
dark, ugly, and animal. To this no genuine poet can 
consent, but the singer of to-day, like his predecessor 
of yesteryear, must make the commonplace extraordi- 
nary, and this he cannot do if his tunes have worn out 
with the times. No one need be surprised, therefore, 
if the rhythm and imagery of the Victorians are to be 
somewhat summarily dealt with ; if there is to be woven 
into the fiber of verse a wealth of elemental things, of 
images taken from the streets, of words gathered from 
the market place, and of strange, barbaric cojour and 
music — tom-toms and indigo. 

The struggle for the mastery of verse is being fought 
out to-day between an ideal that is older than the 
Renaissance and an ultra-modern principle which never 



INHERITORS 161 

has been, and probably never will be, put into success- 
ful practice. In reality it is a contest between the 
poet born of nature and the poet begotten of modern 
thought ; it involves more than vers libre and the son- 
net, it is assuredly not narrower than the distance 
between a pibroch and a klaxon. No one can foretell 
what is going to happen; but it is comparatively easy 
to point out the relation that exists between the new 
Catholic poet and the older masters, who lived closer to 
nature than men have come during the past century. 
One is quite warranted in saying that Patmore's protest 
against the diction of Wordsworth has been accepted: 
"The best poet is not he whose verses are the most 
easily scanned, and whose phraseology is the commonest 
in its materials, and the most direct in its arrange- 
ment : but rather he whose language combines the great- 
est imaginative accuracy with the most elaborate and 
sensible metrical organization, and who, in his verse, 
preserves everywhere the living sense of meter." But 
just as the pre-Raphaelites sought to follow nature 
instead of convention, the mellifluent word-artistry of 
Tennyson has been abandoned by the poets for some- 
thing more homely and homelike. The Chaucer revival, 
carried so far by John Masefield, the earthiness of 
"The Shropshire Lad," and particularly the nature 
poetry of Yeats, Russell, Ledwidge, and other masters 
of the Celtic revival, to some extent govern the direc- 
tion of modern English poetry where it has not grown 
bizarre in its revolt and followed the amazing intel- 
lectual antics of Ezra Pound. 

From this movement Catholic poetry cannot fail to 
gain, for Catholic art in its best, most vital forms 
antedates the Renaissance. May we not cast out our 



162 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

semi-Methodist English hymns for something more sul> 
stantially like the songs of Fortunatus? Francis 
Thompson was fearless enough to borrow rhythms from 
the breviary; Patmore went to St. John of the Cross, 
and Hopkins to the old Greek hymnody. Catholic 
verse to-day is not less resolute in its choice of melody. 
The poetry of Chesterton and Belloc, tuneful, martial, 
close to earth, will be considered later. For the mo- 
ment we shall content ourselves with Mr. Theodore 
Maynard, a poet of the things which Mr. Chesterton 
prizes most highly: laughter, religion, freedom, and 
wine. 

"And the little grey imp of laughter 
Laughs in the soul of me," 

he sings, with just a bit of futility. Somehow one can- 
not imagine Mr. Maynard's soul thus taken possession 
of. "Cecidit, Cecidit, Babylonia Magna" expresses a 
manly contempt for inhumanity ; "The World's Miser" 
is a reverently mystic hymn, and the later poem to "St. 
George," quiet, sad, not at all imbued with laughter, 
is almost great verse written out of a mood of defeat. 
Mr. Maynard is not, however, a great poet; he is a 
poetic Boswell. Almost every idea to which the mas- 
terful G. K. C. has given expression is chronicled some- 
where in Mr. Maynard's songs. He is an admirable 
reflector, too ; confident of his inspiration he forges 
the tune with fervour, and confident in himself he hums 
his drinking songs in the face of a boresome world. Of 
course, Mr. Maynard is not personally a boisterous 
man, but instead an admirable, human, rather reticent 
one; a man whose humour, delicately keen, makes the 



INHERITORS 163 

stoutly defended dogmas of his religion seem a hand- 
some soldier's code of honour. If he is not very origi- 
nal, he has at least caught originality from one of the 
few places on earth where there is still danger of con- 
tagion. 

And in all, it seems that the most significant work 
being done by any of the contemporary English Catho- 
lic poets is that of Helen Parry Eden. This sturdy 
and altogether admirable convert to the Church is the 
author, as everyone ought to know, of two distinctive 
volumes of verse, "Bread and Circuses" and "Coal and 
Candlelight. 5 ' These are songs of a woman with a 
home and children, songs that seem so obvious a part of 
daily life that their realism is one of the most brightly 
optimistic facts in modern letters. A number of the 
poems are written to children or about children, a 
matter which Patmore and Thompson also considered 
of some importance. The rest is soul verse, not theo- 
sophic banality, but remarkably sane, workable, and 
yet intensely spiritual poetry. One cannot help think- 
ing that if Saint Jerome had met, during the course of 
his spiritual labours, with a feminine poet who said, 

"Sweet Sorrow, play a grateful part, 
Break me the marble of my heart 
And of its fragments pave a street 
Where, to my bliss, myself may meet 
One hastening with pierced feet" 

he could not have kept back an expression of intense 
satisfaction. How admirably close to the real a sacra- 
ment may be brought is shown by "A Purpose of 
Amendment" : 



164 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

"So when the absolution's said 
Behind the grille, and I may go, 
And all the flowers of sin are dead, 
And all the stems of sin laid low, 
And I am come to Mary's shrine 
To lay my hopes within her hand — 
Ah, in how fair and green a line 
The seedling resolutions stand." 

Whether Mrs. Eden is writing "To Betsy-Jane, on 
Her Desiring to Go Incontinently to Heaven," or to 
"Thomas Black, Cat to the Sloane Museum," she never 
fails to take delight in the epistle and to say something 
quite as delightful. "Coal and Candlelight" is a 
better domestic poem than Wordsworth managed to 
write, and "Trees" succeeds, where others have failed, 
in really saying a word about trees. If the good 
humour and the spontaneous piety of these verses are 
noteworthy, the element of satire has a scarcely less 
prominent place; the poet has profited by the teaching 
of Jane Austen. Dean Swift would have chuckled 
over Mrs. Eden's rebuke to a time-suffering journalist 
who had complimented a noble lord on his nobleness — 
in hard cash: 

"Here is a rule to save the like mistakes 
And sift the patriots from the money-makers, 
These take an interest in their country's aches. 
And those an interest in their country's acres." 

Mrs. Eden has written altogether too little; it is un- 
fortunate that this is not an age for "Canterbury 
Tales." If one may venture an opinion based on her 
later poems, the war has borne heavily upon her soul; 
and that is after all the fount of song. 



INHERITORS 165 

If Catholic poetry can move forward with the spon- 
taneity, rich candour, and genuine fervour which it has 
manifested thus far, its position in English letters will 
be free and great. Asserting as it does the stability 
of the universe, it can hold its own while the earth 
rocks. Is it not true that the freedom of the human 
race is measured by its bondage to song, that its buoy- 
ancy will always seek an outlet in make-believe? Let 
it be repeated: the poet is a child and the Catholic 
poet is a normal and obedient child. And in more ways 
than one are the words fulfilled: only the children 
shall enter into the kingdom. 



BOOK NOTE 

The best work of Alice Meynell has been issued in three volumes: 
"Poems," "Essays," "Mary, the Mother of God." Now that W. S. 
Blunt's "My Diaries" have been republished, information about 
him may be sought with great profit there. Louise I. Guiney's own 
selection of her poems is entitled, "Happy Ending." A large part 
of her prose has not been collected; "Monsieur Henri" is out of 
print. The only edition of Digby Dolben's verse is that issued, 
with a memoir, by Robert Bridges. "Louise Imogen Guiney" by 
Alice Brown, is an inspiring memoir. An interesting sketch of Miss 
Guiney's personality is that by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Bookman, 
vol. 52. Dolben is presented sympathetically in an essay by B. W 
Cornish, Dublin Review, vol. 151. In connection with Adelaide 
Proctor, see the introduction by Charles Dickens to the volume of 
her poems. G. K. Chesterton supplies a sparkling introduction to 
the first volume of Maynard's collected verse. For information 
about the decadents, see "Oscar Wilde," by Frank Harris; "Oscar 
Wilde and Myself" by Alfred Douglas; "The Letters of Aubrey 
Beardsley"; and "Palms of Papyrus," by M. Monahan. For de- 
tails of a more general or a biographical character, see "The End 
of a Chapter," by Shane Leslie; "The Catholic Encyclopedia"; 
and "The Catholic Who's Who." 



CHAPTER TEN 



RTTSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 

"Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae; et locum habitationis 
gloriae tuae." 

Psalm 25. 

EVERYTHING that is Romanish," wrote the 
liberal and sincere Bishop Wilberforce, "is a 
stench in my nostrils." He was a worthy man 
and, it need scarcely be added, given to straightforward 
diction ; wherefore one hopes charitably that he did not 
altogether realize the inroads which Catholicism had 
made into the English thought of his time. When Dar- 
winism and Bishop Colenso began to disturb the com- 
placency of the British spirit with their negations, the 
Church was already abroad with scarcely less revolu- 
tionary affirmations. She did not always carry the 
day completely, and there were many who loved her 
garments well without ever being able to persuade 
themselves that she was altogether respectable. Some 
idea of the half-way house reached by Pusey, Keble, 
and others has been given; it remains to suggest the 
influence of the Catholic idea on one of the most influ- 
ential literary movements of the nineteenth century, the 
movement which is sometimes called aesthetic and which 
at any rate began its consideration of life with a study 
of art. Seeing how things were in fiction, it demanded 

166 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 167 

that they be thus in fact also ; its chief proponents were 
almost Malebranches of the museum. 

In a good many ways such thinking seems like 
putting the cart before the horse; but its great and 
unforgettable merit is that it really puts something 
before, that is, believes that the cumulative experi- 
ences and intuitions of humanity have their value. 
Once a man is inclined to adopt such a view of things 
he cannot neglect the Catholic Spirit, which is the past 
of Europe. Nor did the English movement we are 
about to examine fail to make this discovery. It may 
be said to have begun with John Ruskin, a very origi- 
nal, stormy, and sensitive man, whose career scarcely 
needs to be outlined here. Reared in strict Evangelism, 
his poetic nature was fired first by Walter Scott, then 
by art, and finally by the great memorials of Christian 
art. Perhaps it is not too much to say that Kenelm 
Digby was in the end Ruskin's chief teacher except in 
the matter of style, wherein the pupil proved magister 
magistrum. His doctrine, despite all errors of detail 
and judgment, gained everlasting effectiveness by in- 
sisting that half of life at least is beauty and that the 
better half. Having made it possible to speak aloud 
of art, he preached it vigorously to society. 

Civilization, he declared, had turned aside from its 
ancient highway into ugly and degenerate paths. Rus- 
kin saw clearly that there had been a break in Eng- 
land's history, and for him it was something like the 
smashing of beautiful glass. "I simply cannot paint," 
he writes, "nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do any- 
thing else that I like, and the very light of the morn- 
ing sky, when there is any — which is seldom nowadays, 
near London — has become hateful to me, because of 



168 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I 
know it not, which no imagination can interpret too 
bitterly." And the aging Ruskin abandoned the ex- 
amination of pictures to become the antagonist of 
political economy. For this he has never been forgiven 
by temperamental amateurs, but it was a great discov- 
ery: Ruskin understood that there had once been a 
connection between beauty and society, between the 
artist and the artisan, and that unless this were re- 
stored the crafts would remain crushing and mechani- 
cal. His practical schemes, like all such isolated 
expedients, made little progress; the Guild! of St. 
George was merely an honourable undertaking. The 
doctrine he preached was the important matter, for its 
roots lay firm in human memory: it was a gospel to 
which the commonest man would turn by atavistic 
instinct and to which Christendom had been dedicated. 
Farther than this Ruskin never went. Looking 
upon nature as everyone's heritage, his egoism became 
social ; looking upon the past, his knowledge begat col- 
lective power. He was not really a philosopher but a 
poet, and although poets make mistakes, their intui- 
tions are generally correct. And while the aesthetic 
movement in England was not altogether dependent 
upon Ruskin, he remains its first parent. Perhaps 
that is why the younger aesthetes will have nothing to 
do with him. The older ones, however, who were not 
so far advanced, took dictation from him rather obedi- 
ently. Of no one is this more true than of Walter 
Pater, the subdued, twilight-loving acolyte of beauty 
whose carefully written sayings are now strangely 
sought after. His voice is stronger than even Arnold's 
in present-day criticism, for his outlook seems more 






RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 169 

modern. If there is one thing which distinguishes 
Pater's mind from that of his age it is, besides his 
concern with beauty simply as beauty, the fact that his 
intellect was centripetal while others were centrifugal: 
that is, while his neighbors like Carlyle, Arnold, and 
even Newman began with a fixed idea and followed it, 
like some philosophic North Star, as near the confines 
of knowledge as they could come, Pater traveled vaga- 
bondishly through the realms of Beauty and finally 
reached a destination as closely resembling Truth as 
his mind was probably capable of dwelling in. 

Being a man who has been extravagantly praised 
and severely satirized, and concerning whom even his 
two chief biographers disagree vehemently, Walter 
Horatio Pater's very reticent simplicity of life baffles 
insight into his personality. He was born on August 
4, 1839, into a family whose Dutch ancestry seems to 
have been held in high regard and whose male members 
had, until the defection of Pater's grandfather, been 
reared as Catholics. The lad was always keenly re- 
sponsive to the beautiful in his surroundings and often 
played at Mass, being decked out for the purpose in a 
set of miniature vestments. Education meant for him 
very largely the classics and the influence of Keble, 
whom he came to know at Oxford. His hard literary 
work, however, led him to abandon any predominant 
religious inclination for the cult of humanism; he 
studied the great French stylists, Sainte-Beuve and 
Flaubert, and came to sympathize earnestly with the 
pre-Raphaelites. Gradually his purpose in life became 
the writing of a few essays annually and he finally 
resigned even the Fellowship in Brasenose College. 

Pater's long residence in a few small rooms at Oxford 



170 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and later at St. Giles made him a traditional university 
figure, although he cannot be said ever to have been 
an academic enthusiast. He took a friendly interest 
in those young men who came to him for advice, cor- 
rected their essays carefully, lectured rather loftily 
on philosophy, and loved the games and by-play 
wherein youth is always freshest and most comely. 
Occasionally he went to the Continent for a visit to 
the shrines of loveliness — Amiens, Azay-le-Rideau, the 
whole of France — and then retreated to Oxford, where 
he laboriously brought together his random notes for 
their fusion into another essay. Kindly, almost ascetic, 
he loved the beautiful in life only after it had been 
exorcised, as it were, by the tranquil intellect. Natu- 
rally such a mode of living, which after all was con- 
templative without any robustness of vision, made for 
isolation, for misunderstanding, for nonsensical imita- 
tion even. Pater's only luxuries were a bowl of dried 
roses, a jaunty tie, and a beautiful style; his disciples 
had numerous others. It was not that men could not 
rise to the master's level; they mistook it for a hill 
and leaped over. "I wish they wouldn't call me a 
'hedonist'," he once remarked a little sadly to Mr. 
Gosse. "It produces such a bad effect on the minds 
of people who don't know Greek." Pater was, in fact, 
the anchorite of truth, striving to "burn with a hard, 
gem-like flame" and like the Suttee, also to do his duty. 
That it brought happiness he would have been the last 
to assert, and would probably have declared with 
Musset: (i Je sais d 'immortelles qui sont de purs sang- 

iotsr 

It must not be forgotten for a moment that Pater's 
chief business was style, and that he succeeded in merit- 



RITSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 171 

ing Bourget's adjective, "perfect." Writing was at- 
tended for him with something like a ritual, to which 
he lent all the pomp denied himself in other ways. 
What his theory was may be gathered easily from the 
famous essay on style. He tried not only to rear the 
straight and symmetrical bell tower, but also to put 
into it the bell, whose melody was never brazen or 
triumphant but approached that perfume of sound 
which the mediaeval ringers are supposed to have drawn 
from their chimes. The method was most toilsome, 
being the merging of many separate thoughts into the 
whole, accomplished by a steady, careful meditativeness 
that was redeemed from servility by the artistic pleas- 
ure it gave. Somewhat humorous instances of Pater's 
meticulous industry are numerous; thus, upon being 
asked by a puzzled friend the meaning of a sentence, he 
studied it anxiously and then replied, "Ah, I see the 
printer has omitted a dash." His style, in the end, 
achieves both music and architecture and is charming 
chiefly by reason of this complexity, this interweaving 
of purpose, while it lacks the vibrancy, the ready 
healthfulness, in which English prose from Scott to 
Newman has been the counterpart of Attic composi- 
tion. If there be any truth in the statement that the 
writer has the best style who seems to have none, by 
so much truth does Pater miss the mastery of words. 

Now any consideration of Pater's ideas will neces- 
sarily involve a consideration of his development. In 
early youth the seductive appeal of outward form had 
been modified for him by a deep religious instinct 
which rendered the beauty of nature something like a 
sacrament. Later the religious side of his nature 
weakened under the application to metaphysics and 



172 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

left him the devotee of a paganism which did not dull 
the one leading urge of his life, intellectual contempla- 
tion. With the essay on Winckelmann Pater's thought 
assumed form. "Religions," he says, "as they grow 
by natural laws out of man's life are modified by what- 
ever modifies his life. They brighten under a bright 
sky, they become liberal as the social range widens, 
they grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human life, 
where the spirit is narrow and confined, and the stars 
are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of these 
differences is one of the gravest functions of religious 
criticism." Here he confesses, despite the liquefaction 
of dogma assumed,, to two things: his perception of the 
continuity of the religious instinct and his great at- 
traction to mediaeval life, which interested him most to 
the end. He wanted to prove that Christianity was 
nothing more than the natural outcropping of a 
vegetarian pagan sentiment in order to make it earthy 
and enjoyable rather than supernatural and trouble- 
some. 

This pragmatism of beauty is at its height again 
in the essay "Leonardo da Vinci," with its famous 
interpretation of La Giaconda, "the woman who, as 
Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint 
Anne, the mother of Mary" ; in the later essay, "The 
School of Giorgine" where it is asserted that "all art 
constantly aspires towards the condition of music"; 
in fact, throughout both "Greek Studies" and "The 
Renaissance." Pater understood full well that the 
mirth of the Attic day had been lost and one need not 
believe that he was really much concerned with getting 
it back. After all, he dealt with modern complexity, 
"that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of our- 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 173 

selves," rather than with the blithe simplicity of Homer. 
His avowed purpose was "to define beauty not in the 
abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to 
find not a universal formula for it, but the formula 
which expresses most adequately this or that manifes- 
tation of it." Indeed, for the contemplative without 
the vision of God, this is the only possible position; 
and Pater therefore promulgated the atomic theory of 
art and insight which he dignified with the title of 
Cyrenaicism. 

A slightly different position is taken up in that most 
remarkable of all Pater's books, "Marius the Epi- 
curean." The young philosopher moving from the 
beautiful seclusion of his ancestral estate to the center 
of pagan society, comes armed with an idealized form 
of Epicureanism and determined to find a philosophy 
which will quiet the restlessness of his thought. He 
meets the best minds that Rome can boast of — Apule- 
ius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucian — but in each instance is 
confronted with a system that breaks down at the 
point of tension. Marius' reaction to the meditations 
of Aurelius is especially interesting; he unfolds the 
bands of thought in which the great Stoic is enshrouded 
and finds the man shivering underneath his skillful 
optimism, bent with the burden of inexplicable evil. 
Then, at last, there is Cornelius the Christian and the 
house of Cecelia where the mysteries of the Faith are 
celebrated and whence the odour of defeat seems to 
have been banished by mystic and eternal roses. Marius 
bows to the hope vouchsafed here, and more sincerely 
to the beauty of the ritual. Taken captive during a 
raid upon the Christians, he contrives the escape of 
Cornelius, is abandoned in a small town to die, 



174 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and is attended by other Christians who, con- 
sidering him one of their own, administer the last 
rites. With happy resignation and a temperate 
curiosity in the journey which he is about to under- 
take, Marius dies. 

It is, of course, a very personal book in which Pater 
patiently reflected the moods of his own spirit and let 
it be known how near his pagan wanderings had 
brought him to the Christian bourne. Closer than this 
hopeful interest he did not come, for as is shown in 
his review of "Robert Elsmere" and in the final essay 
on Pascal, religious belief was based for him upon the 
assumption of a consoling probability and not upon 
what are termed facts. Newman might have written 
the "Grammar of Assent" with Pater in mind. The 
conclusion to be drawn from "Marius the Epicurean" 
is that while its hero did not accept Catholicism as 
truth, he accepted it, in preference to paganism, as 
beauty. He saw that every form of naturalistic phi- 
losophy is insufficient in the face of evil and is, there- 
fore, too simple ; that the Christian view, if one can 
accept it, cures the inner malady of nature with a 
supernatural remedy. 

Any criticism of Pater must begin with a frank state- 
ment of his position. Throughout life, it was the 
sensuous, the physically graceful, which fascinated him 
most, however much he might intellectualize it. He 
was almost naturally a pagan, and if there is anything 
that distinguishes paganism from Christianity it is 
this: paganism is stationary and statuesque, while 
Christianity is mobile, adaptive. It is the difference 
between the Parthenon and Bourges, between the Her- 
cules and the Moses of Michael Angelo. Now this fact 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 175 

is paradoxically matched with another : whereas pagan- 
ism with its multitudinous contours is fluid, Christian- 
ity is straight and solid. Parmenides the static and 
Hereclitus the kinetic are the types of heathen thought 
and, in a sense, are complementary; Christendom is 
different because it has dogma. Now the upshot of 
this is that Pater's conception of art and thought was 
that they resembled the musk-sweet waters of music, 
but that they were waters which did not move, which 
were forceless. This, too, is what formed his style, so 
admirably adapted to eliminate the gulf between Helen 
and Mary the Maid. What spoiled the apprehension 
of Christianity for him was that he beheld the Mass as 
a tableau instead of as a drama. Marius was a marble 
hero, goodly to look upon but useless in battle. 

This pale immobility he never escaped; in fact, the 
still waters were to prove themselves stagnant. In 
"Denys l'Auxerrois" and indeed throughout the 
"Imaginary Portraits," we are face to face with the un- 
restrained morbidity which will later mark the deca- 
dents. These are stories which demand dramatic man- 
ipulation, which cry out for a solution from angel or 
devil. It is rather appalling to find them treated 
with refined Epicureanism. Still, if he had gone 
a little farther, Pater might have discovered the Demon 
as did Villiers de PIsle Adam. Both were egoists, but 
the French novelist's individualism was a sincere con- 
cern with himself in conflict with the age. Of Pater it 
is even possible to assert that his egoism was the re- 
sult of not thinking enough about himself. A serious 
grasp of his own acting personality would have saved 
him from a too exclusive concern with his thoughts. 
He sat entranced beside the beautiful waters of his own 



176 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

mind, and nothing could have induced him to disturb 
their shimmering perfection by taking a swim. 

In the end one says of Pater that he was a con- 
templative whose meditation eliminated the element of 
personality. With his innate nobility of character and 
his devotion to the beautiful, he would have become a 
mystic of the highest rank had he been able to feel 
certain of the reality of God. The reasons for his 
failure to do so are inscrutable. Still, his discovery 
of the Christian tradition as the one sufficiently beauti- 
ful idea, as the one release from the darkness that 
haunts the brighest places in nature, is truly re- 
markable. As the explorer of the outlying, resplen- 
dently purple mists of thought he had hunted one re- 
fuge for a heart whose quest was beauty. That he 
asked for nothing more is not his fault, but his manner. 
Believing that art should have "the soul of humanity 
in it," he tried honestly to be an artist. 

Although many men have felt the influence of Pater, 
no disciple of his makes the same nobility of appeal as 
Lionel Johnson (1867-1902). Slender, graceful, im- 
peccably neat, and earnestly recollected, this young 
poet was a man whose blood was that of a soldier race 
but whose soul was given to the priesthood of art. Ad- 
mitted into the Church during his Oxford career, he 
caught from Pater a hunger for the stateliness of those 
ages which bred and saved our culture, and this he never 
appeased. What the master stood for in Johnson's 
life may be seen from an essay on the "Work of Walter 
Pater" and better still from the beautiful elegy: 

"Gracious God, keep him ; and God grant to me 
By miracle to see 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 177 

That unforgettably most gracious friend 
In the never-ending end." 

Johnson's own work falls very naturally into two 
parts: "The Art of Thomas Hardy" together with 
shorter essays, and his poetry. The great criticism of 
the Wessex novelist is noteworthy for many reasons ; 
its fairness of judgment (though the author was only 
twenty-seven when the book appeared), its thorough 
grasp of the classic spirit, and its unflagging beauty of 
style which, not so ornate or intricate as Pater's, has 
greater virility. If the volume was dedicated to a con- 
sideration of Mr. Hardy, its author was by no means 
averse to expressing his views on literature in general 
and on the work of his own time in particular. 

"Great art," he declares, "is never out of date, nor 
obsolete : like the moral law of Sophocles, 'God is great 
in it and grows not old'; like the moral law of Kant, 
it is of equal awe and splendour with the stars. . . . 
In our day, many men of admirable powers love to 
think of themselves as alone in the world, homeless in 
the universe; without fathers, without mothers; heirs 
to no inheritance, to no tradition; bound by no law, 
and worshippers at no shrine; without meditation, 
without reverence, without patience, they utter, and 
would have us hear, their hasty and uncertain fancies. 
... It is the office of art to disengage from the con- 
flict and the turmoil of life the interior virtue, the 
informing truth, which compose the fine spirit of its 
age; and to do this, with no pettiness of parochial 
pride in the fashions and the achievements oT its own 
age rather with an orderly power to connect what is, 
with what has been, looking out prophetically to what 
will be." 



178 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

For Lionel Johnson, then, the inspiration of Pater 
had led to the idea of embracing culture as a transcend- 
ent inheritance which was common as well as invalu- 
able. He conceived of art as the living residue of a suc- 
cession of immortal minds. 

This view is, no doubt, that of a poet and Lionel 
Johnson was a master of song. But he had a straight- 
forward, clean, unprejudiced mind that found the 
beauty of life largely in the moral law. No one will 
object to this except when it hampers the emotional 
glow which is poetry's priceless treasure. Johnson is 
always, at first, a trifle too stately and ponderously 
reflective for his mission as a troubadour; still, once 
the melody has been struck, he becomes free as any 
jovial singer. Such lyrics as "Our Lady of the Snows," 
"De Profundis," and "Our Lady of the May," are most 
delicate and fragrant, but best among these lyrics is, 
perhaps, that stirring defiance of evil, "The Dark 
Angel." 

"Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, 
Dark Angel! triumph over me: 
Lonely unto the lone I go ; 
Divine, to the Divinity." 

Religious in feeling as all of Johnson's work is, he 
found a mighty source of inspiration in the martyr- 
dom of a neighboring people to whom "Ireland and 
Other Poems" is dedicated. The title poem is a magni- 
ficent expression of sympathy, a worthy companion to 
Mangan's imperishable lament, "Dark Rosaleen." 
Johnson devoted himself to the Celtic cause with the 
ardent energy of Byron, but with a greater pity and 






RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 179 

love. His heart bled for Ireland because he could not 
help it; sympathy was the natural expression of his 
manhood and its motive force. "With all his defer- 
ence," says Miss Guiney, "his dominant compassion, 
his grasp of the spiritual and the unseen, his feet 
stood foursquare upon rock. He was a tower of whole- 
someness in the decadence which his short life spanned. 
. . . He suffered indeed, but he won manifold golden 
comfort from the mercies of God, from human excel- 
lence, the arts and the stretches of meadow, sky, 
and sea." After all, it was a tragically short life, 
broken at the end by disease and loneliness, and crushed 
finally by an accident in the streets of London. Never- 
theless it was a sweet, full life, too, into which nothing 
entered that was mean or vile, which was fired by a 
noble understanding of the synthesis of the ages, and 
beautified and rendered secure by the consecration of 
the Church. That which Pater had sought in vain 
came to his disciple as a fresh and easy gift; but his 
possession of it found him meek even though he was a 
soldier. 

While Lionel Johnson made the step forward which 
Pater could not learn, other disciples of beauty pushed 
the cult of paganism to a lower level and coveted the 
disease from which their master had shrunk. There 
came into English letters the voice of feverish Paris; 
intoxicated by the fetor of life mingled with religion's 
incense, hopelessly degraded because it was not alto- 
gether hopeless. Something has been said already of 
the enigmatic and jaundiced figure of Oscar Wilde, 
who in writing "whatever is realized is right" made at 
once a horrible epigram and a horrible lie; of Dowson 
and Beardsley, victims of the modern educational de- 



180 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

nial of the will. These were not so much followers of 
Pater as interpreters of one aspect of that humanism 
which he had been the first to revive in England. 

Such, in brief, is the story of the men who sought a 
refuge in the past from the complacent industrial ugli- 
ness of England. None of them succeeded fully, and in 
the eyes of the world all proved themselves Quixotic. 
None the less, it was something to have discovered the 
great tradition of Beauty which the modern philistine 
hates worse than hell; it was even better, surely, to 
have felt that this tradition had been sanctified, that its 
roots lay in the religious spirit which Christendom had 
trained to the lovely service of the Cross. But in the 
end they were all outsiders who wrested the key to the 
citadel of culture as men do who realize that it has not 
been born into the family. In a different way there 
came into our nineteenth century literature a force 
from a land where the past was still in the soil — Italy. 
With the appearance of the Rossettis, Dante Gabriel 
and Christina, the Dantean groves for which England 
so mysteriously yearned sent ambassadors to the North. 

Their influence, which has been large, is inextricably 
bound up with what is termed pre-Raphaelitism, a 
movement in art which has been variously described, but 
which may be defined tentatively as a sincere treatment 
of nature by the light of natural instinct. For the 
Rossettis it meant very truly something which ante- 
dates Raphael : the mystic fervour of Dante and Peru- 
gino, the religious art of the Catholic ages. Of course 
neither was actually a Catholic; both were national 
Italian Protestants,* hot from the revolution and sep- 
arated' from the Church in every way excepting the 
one which seemed most important to them, artistic 



RTTSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 181 

sympathy. Their strength lay in the power of their 
inheritance; their weakness almost directly in that 
which deprived them of a portion of it. With them to 
live was to be aesthetic, although in the case of Christina 
the name*burned almost too white for art. 

The inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was nei- 
ther constant nor sure of itself, but drew its glory 
from what was almost a perpetual dream. Considering 
life very much as if he were a stranger, this poet found 
in it strange deeps and heights, colours that seem un- 
earthly and rhythms that are caught from the rising of 
the tide on an unseen sea. While he did not people the 
forests with nymphs or gods, he did commingle heaven 
and earth in a sort of intermediate dimness, a solid 
twilight, in which souls move heavy with perfume and 
weighted with golden garments. Rossetti may not 
have fully understood the symbolism of the early Chris- 
tian artists, but he came nearer to reproducing it than 
most modern poets have come. Thompson is Gothic, 
masterly, structural; Coleridge more ghostly; but 
Rossetti the most colourful. The Blessed Damozel 

"lean'd out 

From the gold bar of heaven: 
Her blue grave eyes were deeper much 

Than a deep water even. 
She had three lilies in her hand 

And the stars in her hair were seven." 

That is, as a matter of fact, how a soul would have 
been represented in mediaaval art, plastic and gorgeous, 
with the beauty of life. No one can write thus unless 
he holds as indubitable, imaginatively at least, the ex- 
istence of a soul, but the intellectual grasp is weak 



182 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

here. The later Christian artists, while preserving the 
bodily form, attenuated it, made the figure represent 
the urge of the spirit to be delivered from its prison. 

Rossetti was by nature a man of riotous enthusi- 
asms, but his work is too quiet and pictorial. He was 
utterly incapable of the intellectual rigidity of Dante. 
Nowhere is this defect shown more clearly than in the 
famous poem, "Jenny." Here the man who has accom- 
panied a girl of the street to her lodgings sits musing 
upon her beauty as she, fallen asleep, is sitting beside 
him. Gradually the sensuous exterior, golden hair, 
and supple bosom, mirrors her soul, and he is led into a 
bit of really admirable moralizing upon what may have 
tarnished the brightness of her virtue. Rising quietly, 
he places a coin where it will look pretty in her hair and 
tiptoes out. This poem is no doubt romantically beau- 
tiful, but it remains futile because it is inactive; as a 
study of human nature it may be admirable but it is 
not human. There is something in it that comes near 
to silliness. Everywhere in his other poems also, Ros- 
setti removes the eagerness and the passion of man to 
a tranquil environment and views them in two dimen- 
sions. Thus, in "The Wine of Circe" he hears the 

"wail from passion's tide-strown shore 
Where the dishevelled sea-weed hates the sea." 

What Dante Gabriel Rossetti lacked was intellectual 
conviction, the sense of the reality of spirit as spirit 
and of body as body. Confusion robs his sacramen- 
talism of the vitality which it possessed in Christian 
art ; he tried to accomplish in philosophic twilight 
what must be done in believing day. A totally different 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 183 

stand was taken by his sister Christina who, in many 
ways, is the most interesting modern Englishwoman of 
letters. Consistently Anglican in her religious affilia- 
tions, her spirit was that of a cloistered nun dwelling 
humbly under the rule of Saint Clare. Intense religious 
conviction twice prevented her marriage; she visited 
Italy only once and never got over her sorrow at leav- 
ing the country of which she remained spiritually a 
native. Transplanted from the time and place into 
which she would have fitted with perfect contentment, 
she conveyed to English letters no note of rebellion but 
instead a song of perfect religious submission, of 
trembling eagerness to serve transcendently, mystically. 
Ford Madox Hueffer describes her person thus : 

"This black-robed figure, with the clear-cut and 
olive-coloured features, the dark hair, the restrained 
and formal gestures, the hands always folded in the 
lap, the head always judiciously a little on one side, 
and with the precise enunciation, this tranquil Religious 
was undergoing within herself always a fierce struggle 
between the pagan desire for life, the light of sun and 
love, and an asceticism that, in its almost more than 
Calvinistic restraint, reached to the point of frenzy. 

"The trouble was, of course, that whereas by blood 
and by nature Christina Rossetti was a Catholic, by 
upbringing and by all the influences that were around 
her she was forced into the Protestant communion. 
Under the influence of a wise confessor the morbidities 
of her self-abnegation would have been checked, her 
doubts would have been stilled." 

Her life was a groping realization of the Catholic 
instinct. It is said that she was scrupulously careful 



184* CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

not to tread upon a scrap of paper in the street, lest 
it should bear the Holy Name. Her writing might 
have been done upon her knees, and her verse is the 
forgotten song of Christendom, unusually plaintive* 
the delicate yet intensely passionate obeisance of the 
soul before the realities of the soul. Occasionally she 
could be romantic, as in "Goblin Market" with its two 
softly moulded girls: 

"Like two blossoms on one stem, 
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow, 
Like two wands of ivory 
Tipped with gold for awful kings." 

But it was with the questions of life taken seriously — 
too seriously, in fact — that she was usually concerned : 

"Does the road wind up-hill all the way? 
Yes, to the very end. 
Will the day's journey take the whole long day? 
From morn to night, my friend. 

But is there for the night a resting-place? 

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin: 
May not the darkness hide it from my face? 

You cannot miss that inn." 



Writing with a beautiful earnestness out of the sad- 
ness of her isolation, Christina Rossetti has made 
poetry almost too grave for song. Hers is the fancy 
of an abnormally solemn orphan child, distrustful of 
yet hungering after the laughter of life. She did not 
influence greatly the character of modern verse, but 



RUSKIN, PATER, AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 185 

her individuality has a solid quality that will not brook 
neglect. And if she did not find her way into the body 
of the Church, she was united with its soul, an ascetic 
Keble with the eyes of a wanderer to the ancient places 
which are forlorn. Strangely different, it is together 
that the Rossettis belong. He with an etherialized 
conception of bodily form, colour and rhythm, she 
with a realistic understanding of the soul, unflinching, 
striving, are the two sides of the artistic tradition 
which superseded the pagans. Unfortunately their in- 
fluence has seldom been felt thus, in unity, and the 
splendid earnestness of the Italian spirit has been 
mimicked by a group of muddling aesthetes whose veins, 
to use Kilmer's vigorous phrase, "drip scented ink." 
Perhaps their best disciple is that rather unstable 
Bohemian, Ford Madox Hueffer, pre-Raphaelite in the 
Rossetti sense while being both more material and less 
subtly suggestive. An enumeration of others would 
consume too much space. Let it suffice to mention 
the names of Katherine Tynan and John Masefield. 

On the whole the literary force which came into Eng- 
lish letters from a perception and partial expression 
of the artistic ideals of Christendom emphasized the 
beauty of the Catholic Spirit and rebelled hotly against 
the sordid monotony of industrial civilization. Of only 
one man concerned in it, Lionel Johnson, can it be af- 
firmed that his life was Catholic inwardly and out- 
wardly. Nevertheless, the others in their separate 
ways bore testimony to the vigour and sanctity of the 
Church. They were great minds and great hearts, and 
even in the failure of Ernest Dowson there is a great 
deal of strength; for it is by eternal hope that men 
live and by the constancy of their faith in the stars. 



186 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

BOOK NOTE 

See, in a general way, the "Cambridge History of English Lit- 
erature" and Chesterton's "Victorian Age." The most noteworthy 
biography of Ruskin is that by Sir E. T. Cook; note also "Vic- 
torian Prose Masters," by Brownell, and "Philosophy of Ruskin," 
by A. D. Chevrillon, of the French Academy. Pater's biographers 
include A. C. Benson, Wright, and Greenslet. See also, "Pater: a 
Critical Study," by Edward Thomas ; "Egoists," by J. G. Huneker ; 
"Heralds of Revolt," by William Barry; and "The ^Esthetic Out- 
look: Walter Pater," Edinburgh Review, 1907. In connection with 
Johnson, see "The Irish Literary Renaissance," by Boyd, and 
"The Poets' Chantry," by Katherine Br6gy. L. I. Guiney's essay 
on Johnson is to be found in The Month, vol. 100. For informa- 
tion concerning the Rossettis, see "Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphael- 
itism," by Wm. M. Rossetti, and "Memories and Impressions," by 
Ford M. Hueffer. The best view of Christina Rossetti is that 
supplied by Mackenzie Bell; on Dante Gabriel, see the monographs 
by William Sharp, H. C. Marillier, and A. C. Benson. 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 

THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 

"The customary prejudices against the 'laws of history' cannot 
withstand five minutes of reflection; for, however little thought 
one may give to them, only the rules of mathematics are their 
superiors in certitude." 

Charles Maurras. 

THERE is something in every religion of eternity, 
but for Christians eternity is fundamental. 
Perhaps no one has stated more dramatically 
than Saint Augustine the mysterious fluidity of time — 
the imperceptible and awesome shading-off of the pres- 
ent into the past and forward into a future that is 
always an undiscovered country. Nevertheless, this 
thought which stresses so clearly the worthlessness of a 
moment is a powerful argument for the dignity of the 
year. The patient steadfastness of the past is our 
bulwark against the dismaying old Greek philosophy of 
perpetual movement. Studying it we shall understand 
the constancy of the human mind, the modernity of our 
progenitors in the dim ages when mankind was young. 
A great deal is being said in these days when supermen 
are scarce about the unity of the human race; of the 
common consciousness which despite all differences has 
moved men onward since the beginning and which will 
save them now if they recognize its power. And this 
will bring us at once to the consideration of a very 

187 



188 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

important truth: the only teaching which has insisted 
on and labored for the solidarity of the race is the 
doctrine of Christendom. Catholic civilization is alone 
in having worked on the assumption of a common ori- 
gin and a common end ; in having proclaimed the neces- 
sity for and the reality of corporate action, while pro- 
viding an institutional scheme whose flexibility for the 
individual is as manifold as the separate courses of a 
multitude of stars. 

The very nature of Christendom is historical. It is a 
civilization whose central act is a sublime miracle that 
keeps the past alive. No claim which it puts forth is 
philosophically so important as the assertion that 
it has remained historically unchanged; and while ad- 
mitting the development of dogma the Church main- 
tains that her dogma is of the Catacombs. The sublime 
fact that if the past were blotted out to-morrow Chris- 
tendom would die, has been so well understood that we 
have even placed tradition on a level with scripture. 
There are, also, other subsidiary ways in which the 
Christian instinct for the preservation of the past has 
manifested itself. We have remembered, while others 
forgot, the progressive origin of our culture; its heri- 
tage from the society of Greece and Rome, its conquest 
of Europe and its mediaeval kingdom. We have under- 
stood that by reason of the sanctification of the best 
that was thought and spoken in the gardens of Athens 
and on the seven hills of the Csesars, Europe came into 
possession of the most equitable, energetic, and satisfy- 
ing civilization known to man. Nor have we failed to 
discern the failure of the later ages to preserve the con- 
cord upon which society depends: we have seen the 
very idea of the past drowned in blood and error, as- 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 189 

sailed by all the words of sophistry and scorn. But in 
the light of the years whose splendour is part of our 
creed, we have dared to hope in the future, and our 
debt to the men, the historians, who have kept that light 
burning is larger than we can easily pay. 



Now there are, broadly, two ways of writing history. 
The first is the method which, the mind searching care- 
fully amid the chaotic records of the ages by the light 
of general truths, divines the movements which domi- 
nate events ; which observes the rhythmic yet designed 
ebb and rise of the human flood; and which perceives 
in the apparently disparate currents the single purpose 
of the sea. It is a method requiring the highest efforts 
of imaginative genius enlightened by a scrupulous re- 
gard for the most infinitesimal shred of evidence, and 
withal lending itself, because of the magnitude of its 
undertaking, to the likelihood of error. The second is 
the method which strives to wrest from the details, the 
melee, of life in the past the story and the lesson. This 
is tireless in its inspection of records, of monuments, 
of letters written with no eye to the future. Strong 
imaginative gifts will save historians of such a kind 
from the fate of the annalist by showing the pattern 
of the past and by discovering the meaning of the mi- 
grations of the dead. These two methods, inductive 
and deductive, are really supplementary: both are 
necessary and both are human. 

Fortunately modern Catholic historians have grap- 
pled with the problems confronting them in a surpris- 



190 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ingly able way. Before their work had been begun, 
even the writers of history in England had no concep- 
tion of Christendom as a social organization. That 
was for them a buried city, ruined by its sins. The 
isolation of Britain's story, brought about by the ex- 
aggerated importance lent to the reigns of Henry 
VIII. and Elizabeth, had despoiled the popular mind 
of the sense of a common civilization which Christian 
Europe had espoused. Nowadays men, disturbed by 
the threatened dissolution of society, are eagerly seek- 
ing again the grounds of solidarity. What is it that 
mankind is trying to accomplish? What has it been 
doing in the past? These are burning questions, and 
we shall see the answer which the Catholic historian 
has brought. 

To those for whom the Church is the central fact 
in the world, her progress and victory have seemed 
coordinate with the development of surrounding so- 
ciety. Rome, absorbing the intellectual and artistic 
forces of Greece, had built a working empire and laid 
on foundations of indubitable strength a government 
that was master of everything except the barbaric 
fringes of the world. Then had come the collapse — 
almost inexplicable — of the magnificent paganism of 
the Caesars, and its fragments were carried away by 
generous Christian blood. Rome the empire died in 
cruelty and darkness, but Roman civilization was pre- 
served by a now conquering Christendom and later car- 
ried to a length and across larger areas than had been 
dreamed of before. The meekness of the Gospel as- 
sailed the last and most formidable frontiers. 

This was Newman's doctrine. In nothing is the in- 
tuition of the great Cardinal more remarkable than in 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 191 

his conception of culture as a common trust which the 
ages had conspired to save. He knew that the Romans 
had not forgotten Rome. The "Historical Sketches" 
and certain other books are marvelous examples of 
mind divining principles which all the facts substan- 
tiate. "When," he says, "the storm mounted overhead 
and broke upon the earth, it was these scorned and 
detested Galileans, and none but they, the men-haters 
and God-despisers, who, returning good for evil, housed 
and lodged the scattered remnants of that old world's 
wisdom which had so persecuted them, went valiantly 
to meet the savage destroyer, tamed him without arms, 
and became the founders of a new and higher civiliza- 
tion. There is not a man in Europe now, who talks 
bravely against the Church, but owes it to that Church, 
that he can talk at all." 

Newman's realization of the central unity of Chris- 
tendom is the only one of his doctrines to be recalled 
here. It is the sole theory which makes the story of 
man intelligible and purposeful while preserving the 
necessary realism; its worth has been recognized fully 
by modern historians, especially in France. In Eng- 
land it has gained many able protagonists, among 
whom are Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, W. S. Lilly, and 
Hilaire Belloc, and it is the thesis of that very impor- 
tant book, "Europe and the Faith," of which more 
will be said in time. Nor should the work of another 
author, concerned during his studious lifetime with the 
dawn of Christendom, be overlooked. "The Formation 
of Christendom," T. W. Allies' large and imposing re- 
ply to the theories of Gibbon, is a monument of erudi- 
tion and incisive criticism. The author's purpose was 
to show the unity existing amid the chaotic variety 



192 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the early Christian times and to outline a philosophy 
of history from the foundation of the Church to the 
reign of Charlemagne. His sonorous style and firm 
grasp of detail are not unworthy to rival the great 
skeptic who wrote the "Decline and Fall." In particu- 
lar the last two volumes of the series, "Peter's Rock and 
Mohammed's Flood" and the "Monastic Life," are 
noteworthy for substance and dignity of expression. 

No philosophic evaluation of history has been, or is 
likely to be, perfect in every respect. With the dis- 
covery of new sources of information some significant 
link in the speculative historian's chain of reasoning is 
sure to snap. Confident, however, that the general 
principles which Catholics believe to be reflected in 
history are correct, other able historians have con- 
tented themselves with the examination and correlation 
of evidence, and with the lucid setting forth of the 
human story simply as a story. The mere presenta- 
tion of the truth, it has seemed to them, is the strongest 
argument for that truth. Of the high gifts and ardu- 
ous labor demanded by such an undertaking, the life of 
John Lingard gives ample proof. His "History of 
England," which is today the acknowledged compeer 
of the best known chronicles of that country, was 
written by a man who retired from the executive ac- 
tivity toward which his earlier life had seemed to point, 
and who laid aside the offer of bishoprics and cardinal- 
cies, in order to devote himself wholeheartedly to the 
scrutiny of documents. Only an unusually heroic man 
could have viewed the task without despair. 

In order to appreciate fully the character of Lin- 
gard's achievement it is advisable to consider momen- 
tarily the life and environment of the man. He was 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 193 

born in 1771, and having decided to become a priest 
went to Douai where he stayed until, during the French 
Revolution, he barely escaped the fury of a mob and 
returned to England. Here he assumed the responsi- 
bilities of vice-president and professor in the newly es- 
tablished college at Crook Hall, Durham. Having 
become interested in Anglo-Saxon history, he wrote a 
series of articles on the subject, which were published 
at the instance of his friends. The success attending 
this work induced him to begin the monumental history 
for which he is remembered, and he therefore retired to 
a country curacy. One must bear in mind the lament- 
able condition of English Catholics at this time. Re- 
cently freed from the penal code, their small handful — 
60,000 — was torn with dissension which separated the 
laity from the clergy, and prelates one from the other. 
There was no such thing as Catholic opinion. Scorned 
by the mass of Englishmen, accused of every kind of 
villainy and more than occasionally threatened with 
dire penalties, the faithful went their way, reduced to 
an impotent silence. It seemed scarcely the moment 
for any kind of literature except the polemic pamphlet 
or the horatory sermon ; but Lingard boldly made the 
resolve to write his history impersonally. "The good 
to be done is to write a book that Protestants will 
read," he said with admirable wisdom. 

The first volumes of the history were published with- 
out great stir ; but as the successors neared modern 
times, the reviewers began to take note of them; some 
vituperation and controversy ensued, till finally the 
approving dictum of Hallam, then at the height of his 
fame, made the reputation of Lingard for accuracy 
and fairness secure. Edition succeeded edition, the 



194 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

work was translated and abridged ; but surely the best 
tribute anyone can pay its author is to say that he 
undermined a tradition which had been rigorously im- 
planted in the English heart — the stupid assertion 
that a Catholic must lack character. Long after his 
death in 1851 men kept saying with Lord Acton, "Lin- 
gard has never been proved wrong." 

The estimate was achieved by firm adherence to prin- 
ciples. In the Preliminary Notice to the final edition of 
his history, Lingard modestly remarked: "In dispos- 
ing of the new matter derived from these several 
sources, I have strictly adhered to the same rules to 
which I subjected myself in the former editions, to ad- 
mit no statement merely upon trust, to weigh with 
care the authorities on which I rely, and to watch with 
jealousy the secret workings of my own personal feel- 
ings and prepossessions." His success in doing these 
things is heightened by a style which is simple, very 
manly, and not at all elaborate. With his distrust of 
the "philosophy of history" he banned all imaginative 
portraits or that writing out of scenes which was Mac- 
aulay's chief delight. Extending as it does from B.C. 
55 to A.D. 1689, Lingard's History affords plenty of 
opportunity for brisk narratives ; this is seized but 
never for its own sake, so that the reader, trusting his 
reliable guide, is willing to forego the comparative 
glamour of another's conversation. 

There were, obviously, many documents to which 
Lingard did not have access and the discovery of 
which will amplify the sketches of events given in his 
ever valuable History. The sifting of a vast amount 
of such evidence concerning the crucial movement in 
England's story, the Reformation, and that social order 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 195 

which preceded it, has been the life-work of a great 
Benedictine, Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet. Vol- 
uminous as his writings are and great as his non-liter- 
ary work has been, Cardinal Gasquet may be said to 
have focussed the attention of all right-thinking his- 
torians on an important period hitherto neglected 
and to have drawn conclusions as startling as they are 
incontrovertible. His method is apparently a simple 
appeal to documents, but it is infinitely more, being 
in reality an attempt to reconstitute the life of a period 
in all its divergent manifestations, and to judge the 
men of past ages in the surroundings which circum- 
stanced them. Cardinal Gasquet has killed the old nar- 
row straight-line historian by shifting the argument 
from the abstract to the concrete ; to the probable 
amazement of many a smug maker of compendiums he 
has raised the dead to speak. 

In that very fascinating volume, "The Eve of the 
Reformation," the reader is first told that the author 
is not holding a brief for anybody, but will allow the 
case to present itself. Then one is favoured with an 
innocent-looking chapter on the revival of letters, which 
one closes with the impression that something has come 
out of the real past instead of merely from a library. 
Next the civil and religious governments are examined 
for their mutual relations ; the mighty figure of Eras- 
mus is unveiled of myth and walks the earth, a man ; the 
institutional life of the time, the educational, parish, 
and guild characteristics of society, are reconstructed. 
One rises from the reading of this monumental volume 
impressed with the fact that here at last is history 
as it ought to be, stripped of conjecture and sophistry, 
and cheered, too, by the discovery that mediaeval life 



196 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

is humanly most fascinating and that a million lies 
have been relentlessly slaughtered. For everyone in- 
terested in history there is no book in these days more 
valuable than "The Eve of the Reformation." 

In an earlier book, "Henry VIII. and the English 
Monasteries," Cardinal Gasquet had undertaken to 
attack the long-established antipathy of Englishmen 
to the monastic institutions of the Church. His method, 
therefore, is one of resolute adherence to contemporary 
accounts examined by the most severe standards of 
scientific criticism. The reader's interest grows as the 
machinations of Henry are laid bare by the records of 
his reign. Old deposits of papers, which the easy- 
going romancer of an earlier date had ignored while 
polishing his periods, turn literally into bundles of 
truth. The actions of Wolsey and Cromwell, the grad- 
ual suppression of monasteries and convents for the 
sake of their spoil, the popular protests so altogether 
tragic and unavailing, the resultant martyrdom of the 
religious and the brutal impoverization of the people, 
compel the most reluctant reader to accept the conclu- 
sion that the story was vastly different from what he 
had fancied. The book, which began so demurely, has 
managed somehow to rise with the wrath of the aven- 
ger, armed with facts to which no answer can be made. 
The skill with which Cardinal Gasquet has managed 
the narrative is worthy of a novelist of the highest 
genius. 

It seems safe to assert that such books will induce 
intelligent Englishmen to accept a fairer view of the 
Reformation, and to modify their opinions on other im- 
portant matters. In time they may restore the sense 
of the singleness and continuity of European civiliza- 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 197 

tion, give social action a satisfactory leg to stand on, 
and restore the prestige of the Church with the com- 
mon people. Having understood the possibility of 
rendering such service, the Benedictines of England 
have founded a veritable school of history, the fruits 
of which are large and important. We can do no more 
here than to recall a few names, primarily that of Dom 
Bede Camm, a charming writer who since his conver- 
sion has busily popularized some of the most appealing 
portions of English ecclesiastical history and whose 
"Lives of the Blessed English Martyrs" are the prod- 
ucts of unusual care and sympathy. Then there is 
Dom Henry Norbert Birt, whose best known work, 
"The Elizabethan Religious Settlement," should re- 
move many misconceptions and also win readers by rea- 
son of its honest ability, and Dom J. H. Chapman, 
whose various volumes are the creations of a refined 
and most diligent scholarship. 

Truly the English Benedictines have deserved well 
of us. In passing, however, one should note the fine 
work of other priests — Thomas A. Hughes, of the 
Society of Jesus, for instance, whose historical re- 
searches into the past of his own order have gained 
such wide admiration, and Canon William Barry, whose 
brilliant analysis of the Papacy and its influence is 
known to a large audience. Nor should the student 
of literature neglect to consider the painstaking labors 
of Irishmen who, in Maynooth and elsewhere, have 
done such pioneer work in reconstituting the past of 
their own country, a past radiant with the blessing of 
the Church even if crowned so heavily with martyrdom. 
The Irish Dominicans have recently offered a few vol- 
umes which we hope are the forerunners of a series 



198 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

equal in value to what the English Benedictines have 
done. The lover of Newman will recall the introductory 
lecture on "The Idea of a University" with its entranc- 
ing picture of the ancient harmony existing between 
the neighboring peoples, and hope that a study of the 
past will reveal to both the means for a decently Chris- 
tian adjustment of their difficulties. 

We may turn back for a moment to an enigmatic 
man who stood close to Newman in many ways, but 
whose erudition was not of that patient sort which 
can wait for the day of its justification. Lord Acton, 
whose vast and somewhat arrogant learning spent itself 
largely on polemics of a journalistic character, was an 
admirable student of history (though his outlook was 
more than a little clouded by German metaphysics), 
but he lacked the impetus to a single, substantial work. 
His services to periodical literature were extraordinary 
in that he imbued it with a solidity of scholarship 
which had been notably missing. Again, as the ad- 
viser of many writers, as the friend of Dollinger and 
Newman, and as the designer of the "Cambridge Mod- 
ern History," he left a name in English history not al- 
together written on sand. 

The American Catholic contribution to the study 
of the past has as yet assumed no proportions of dig- 
nity. John Gilmary Shea, chief worker in this field, 
was a man of great ability but his lack of literary in- 
stinct gives his books a very colourless cast. As the 
author of a "History of the Catholic Church in the 
United States" Dr. Shea gathered a mass of precious 
information which, but for him, would probably have 
been lost forever. Nor is the story of the American 
Church a secondary affair, but rather a chronicle of 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 199 

unsurpassed heroism, of violent struggles against the 
odds of prejudice and poverty. Shea's researches into 
the story of the earlier missionaries and explorers have 
been of exceptional value; they aided Parkman in the 
making of his great if biased narratives, and have borne 
later fruit in the work of Father Campbell, S. J., author 
of "Pioneer Priests of North America." When the 
future historian of the unparalleled development of 
the Catholic Spirit in America shall proceed to write 
his narrative, it must be under a steady feeling of in- 
debtedness to the scholarly, if unreadable, books of 
John Gilmary Shea. 

On the whole, there is nothing of which we ought to 
be so proud and of which we are in fact so densely ig- 
norant as the service of our historians. They are pre- 
eminently historical and not, like so many puny chron- 
iclers, hysterical. If in their devotion to the work the 
gravity of some has been too grave, we may raise up 
other men to give the narrative the charm of Macaulay, 
or the piquancy of Taine. In fact, we have already 
done so in ways which will be considered later. As for 
the historical labor of Newman, Lingard, and Gasquet, 
it may be said that together they have given an im- 
petus to a composite idea of civilization which men 
may not care to adopt at once but which, in the end, 
they will not gainsay. 

II 

However well unified our conception of society may 
be or however much interest we may feel in the popular 
movements and aspirations of the past, it must remain 
true that one of the greatest duties of history is to 



200 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

present the hero. While mankind gropes its way al- 
most unconsciously to the Providential destiny, there 
are a few men in every generation who discern the 
march of events, in whom mind and will are stern 
enough to resist the apparently inevitable and to sway 
the multitude; there are other men also whose mental 
or moral excellencies raise up a silent bulwark against 
the swaying human flood, who direct the course of 
humanity by their majestic immobility. They are, re- 
spectively, the Napoleons who attack and the Welling- 
tons who refuse to move. Needless to say, the Catholic 
Spirit has been productive of both. The crowded gal- 
leries of the mediaeval cathedral bear testimony to some ; 
the biographies of literature and history chronicle 
others. Now the writing of biography is a surprisingly 
spontaneous thing, like poetry. It must be born of 
enthusiasm for the hero, it must glow with a realization 
of the necessity of that hero's message for the present 
age; and the best biography, like its subject, will be 
immortal. No one has needed to write a life of Nel- 
son after Southey, or a life of Johnson since Boswell. 
Occasionally, it is true, the complexity of the theme 
and its queer involutions may render the task difficult, 
if not impossible. Where is the final story of Napoleon, 
Dante, or Lincoln? In general the most satisfying 
biography will have some of the impersonality of a por- 
trait: it will show the artist's hand but the sitter's 
face. 

A salutary preface to the consideration of work done 
by recent Catholic biographers is the "Lives of the 
Saints" by Rev. Alban Butler. Men of sanctity are 
models for all men, and although this contribution to 
their history was completed before the days of the 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 201 

Catholic revival, it is the model for so much that is 
best in writing that it ought always to be borne in 
mind. Comprising as it does more than fifteen hundred 
biographies, each the result of deep study and pene- 
trative analysis of evidence, it is difficult to believe that 
it was the work of a man engaged in many tasks and 
even the author of other books. Alban Butler was a 
professor at Douai when he conceived the plan of his 
magnum opus; later, missionary duties, the presidency 
of the college of St. Omer, and extensive executive 
tasks prevented the publication of the book, but did 
not dissuade the author from his high if almost sacri- 
ficial purpose. He set to work with as strict a regard 
for historical truth as the Bollandists strove for; but in 
addition he was fortunately gifted with a genial per- 
sonality which delighted in sprightly narrative and did 
not allow either science or devotion to obscure the quest 
of beauty that is every writer's privileged business. 
Before his time the English saints had been lost in 
legend or in studied hostility ; after him it was true to 
say that they had recovered not only historical ex- 
istence but their rightful place in the popular litera- 
ture of England. 

That place, once so important, is being recognized 
again; and it is noteworthy that one of the scholars 
most interested in the subject, Professor Gordon Hall 
Gerould, should have expressed the highest regard for 
Butler. "The book," he says, "is the great classic 
of modern English Catholicism, and it is time-defying in 
the same way as the history of Butler's great contem- 
porary, Gibbon. . . . Whether the "Lives of the 
Saints" be read as a book of devotion or history, 
whether by the man of doubting or believing mind, it 



202 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

cannot well fail to attract and give profit." The word 
lore is one of the most charming in the language, and 
Butler with all his calm detachment from mere ambi- 
tion and his sincere piety understood it well. His 
sketches are alive, are written in the comely English 
of the eighteenth century, and are executed with the 
care of a most exacting artist. To what another writer 
would have made monotonous or heavy with moral 
teaching, he contrived to lend a greater allurement 
than Johnson threw about the poets. Butler made 
the saints live again just as a multitude of English- 
men were getting ready to pray, and he left them and 
their children a heritage of peace and light which is 
like a garden in Arcady. Of course, he had not seen 
many important documents and occasionally he made 
mistakes; but the substantial accuracy of his work 
cannot even now be challenged. 

The fact that an important series of saints' lives 
was begun under the direction of Newman, brings us 
to his own biography. Without disparaging the vol- 
umes of Hutton or Meynell, it may be said that the 
task of interpreting the Oratorian Cardinal has been 
fulfilled most satisfactorily by Wilfrid Ward. This 
highly gifted man, the son of W. G. Ward and during 
many years the editor of the Dublin Review, brought 
to the study of Newman exemplary industry and 
enough tact to realize that his subject ought to be al- 
lowed to speak for himself. The "Life," therefore, con- 
sists chiefly of letters and utterances designed to show 
Newman's state of mind after he had become a Catho- 
lic. The biographer appears only in the arrangement 
of the material and in the making of what seem to him 
necessary deductions. The portrait thus presented 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 203 

has not a little of the impersonality and deference of 
good art. 

Unfortunately the book, great though it is, ad- 
mits of serious objections. Owing to the foreshorten- 
ing of Newman's Anglican career, the public events of 
his Catholic priesthood gain too much prominence. 
Because the spiritual character of the man as he had 
developed through the ordeal of his conversion is left 
in the background, his reverses and temporary oblo- 
quy are given an inner importance which they surely 
did not possess in real life. Newman dwells so much 
in the shadow that one gets the impression that light 
was generally shut off. "There was a wart on New- 
man's face," a wise and genial critic of Ward's book 
once remarked to him, "and you have made it so large 
that the face is hidden." To some extent the biogra- 
pher realized the mistake which he had unconsciously 
made and his "Last Lectures" are admirable interpre- 
tative corrections. Despite its limitations, however, 
Ward's book has rendered a distinct service and an 
accompanying Vie intime will some day be written. 

In "The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman," 
Ward found a larger canvas and covered it with inter- 
esting figures brought together in a well-knit design. 
The strong men who dominated the early days of the 
Catholic awakening are set forth in the book with 
freshness, vigour, and interest, Cardinal Wiseman 
made up for what he lacked in genius by a fine vivacity, 
a sterling talent for public affairs, and a deeply re- 
ligious spirit. Not so extraordinary a man as New- 
man, he seems to have adapted himself more gracefully 
to the biographer's requirements. But the best work 
that Wilfrid Ward did was, perhaps, the bright and 



204 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

informing "William George Ward and His Times." In 
this narrative of his gifted father the writer found 
opportunity to describe many fascinating intellectual 
characteristics of the Oxford Movement, and the ec- 
centricity of his subject added a not unwelcome pun- 
gency. It cannot be said of such biographies that they 
are perfect works of art; but they are sane, earnest 
efforts to give common-sense views of great men and 
are saved by an ever-present critical instinct from rant 
and bias. No man has done larger work in setting be- 
fore the world heroes who otherwise would probably 
have been ignored. 

A student of life not so well known, perhaps, as 
Ward, but gifted to write one of the most masterly 
biographies of recent times, is J. G. Snead-Cox. His 
"Life of Cardinal Vaughan" served to make known a 
most profoundly spiritual man, who governed the 
ecclesiastical affairs of London with splendid success 
and quietly practiced a noble asceticism. With the 
sympathy and diligence of a true friend, Snead-Cox 
set to work upon a book that has the best qualities of 
intimacy with none of its superfluous gestures. "No 
interpreter was needed," he says modestly, "for the 
dead could speak, and far more convincingly for him- 
self." But the Archbishop of Westminster, had he 
been in search of fame, could have chosen no better her- 
ald. Some of the chapters, particularly that on 
"Characteristics," are models, and the whole book is 
one that will be read with love. 

A recent work of unusual interest is Shane Leslie's 
presentation of the real Cardinal Manning. That 
great prelate, so deeply inspired by the almost military 
zeal of the reformer, had neither the intellectual re- 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 205 

ticence nor the single-spiritedness which makes for easy 
approval of personality. As a Churchman his inter- 
ests were apt to take refuge in intransigeance of mood, 
in the refusal to give his opponents a hearing ; as an in- 
dividual priest, however, he lived very conscious of his 
unworthiness and consumed with eagerness to achieve 
an apostolate. Purcell in his biography of Manning 
misread the evidence he examined and left a great deal 
unread ; unable to appreciate any but ostentatious mo- 
tives, he made the surface of Manning's soul seem the 
substance of it. Naturally the injury done to Man- 
ning's character was very great, and the cynicism with 
which the public came to view a leading representative 
of Catholicism was extended to other representatives. 
This regrettable impression was combated to some ex- 
tent by various replies, but previous to the appearance 
of Mr. Leslie's work the first impression remained ex- 
traordinarily persistent. 

Hitherto unnoticed collections of letters, private 
journals, and testimonials were unearthed and studied 
with insight and fairness. Shane Leslie is the master 
of a style which scintillates with the intelligence of a 
poet and, like the best of French prose, is quick to 
reflect the nuances of imagination. Possessing an un- 
usual knowledge of the official life of Manning's time, 
he was able to set forth the significance of the Cardi- 
nal's policy as a part of its environment. Matters 
that seem grotesque when viewed alone become intel- 
ligible when seen as portions of a pattern, and Shane 
Leslie has made an admirable pattern. The disposi- 
tion of the work is so sincere, the analysis of Man- 
ning's inner life so calm and sympathetic, that the 
moral heroism of the Cardinal is accepted by the reader 



206 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as a fact. Some of the conclusions reached are open 
to dispute, but the book is on the whole the most com- 
pletely satisfying Catholic biography that has ap- 
peared in many a day. 

Unfortunately we shall not be able to give other 
works the notice which they deserve. Our literature 
has been enriched by a large number of pleasurable 
biographies which have come like revelations of the 
energy of life. Agnes Strickland's "Lives of the Queens 
of England" preserve their charm for new genera- 
tions, and may be read with profit even though the re- 
search upon which the narratives were based could 
have been much more careful. Canon William Barry's 
"Cardinal Newman" remains the best one-volume life, 
and its brilliant presentation of the Cardinal from a 
literary point of view is an excellent introduction to 
the study of his writings. In "Ernest Renan" he pro- 
vided a searching study of an interesting if misled 
mind: here and in many other books Canon Barry 
has displayed critical strength and a ready under- 
standing of the Continental spirit. Edwin de Lisle's 
"Life and Letters of A. P. de Lisle" is a serious and im- 
portant account of a man devoted to the conversion of 
England; the biography of John Lingard, by Martin 
Haile, contrives to set forth clearly the personality 
of that great historian, and such other books as Rich- 
ard Simpson's "Edmund Campion," Maisie Ward's 
"Father Maturin," Bernard Holland's "Kenelm Digby, 
a Memoir," Everard Meynell's "Francis Thompson" 
(a masterpiece of which a great deal might be said), 
and Father Martindale's "Robert Hugh Benson" are 
literary portraits of exceptional charm and signifi- 
cance. Theirs is a work whose reward is not often 



THE CHRONICLERS OF CHRISTENDOM 207 

commensurate with the importance of the undertak- 
ing. 

Is it necessary to emphasize again the importance 
of history in the development of the Catholic Spirit? 
We have already said that Christendom is inseparable 
from the past ; that from an irrefragable presentation 
of that past opinions which have been as popular as 
they are false must be consigned to the dust-heap of 
prejudice. Lingard, Gasquet, and their followers 
have done more to dispel unfairness than an army of 
missionaries; they have killed forever the myth of 
Christian oppression and Elizabethan virtue. Catho- 
lic education and thought today can become solid only 
if they are built upon a firm understanding of the unity 
of Christendom; we must somehow realize the connec- 
tion between ourselves and the Christian peoples of the 
Ages of Faith, and understand that Augustine speaks 
to us as directly as he did to the Carthaginians, that 
the voice of Jeanne d'Arc is a living voice, and that the 
Crusades accomplished what everyone today despairs 
of, the sanctification of the mob. Good history is liter- 
ature because it has power to inform the intellect, to 
arouse the gravest and most delicate emotions, to in- 
spire us with that contemplativeness which is the goal 
of art. 

BOOK NOTE 

The best edition of Lingard is that edited by. Hilaire Belloc. 
Some works of interest in connection with the subject-matter 
treated in this chapter are: "Saints' Stories," by G. H. Gerould; 
"Lord Acton and His Circle," by Dom Gasquet; Newman's "His- 
torical Essays"; Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's introduction to her hus- 
band's "Last Lectures"; Belloc's "First and Last" (those essays 
which deal with the writing of history) ; and T. W. Allies' "A 
Life's Decision." See also the "Catholic Encyclopedia." 



CHAPTER TWELVE 

ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 

"Every one on the earth should believe, amid whatever madness 
or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object 
on the earth." 

Chesterton's "Browning." 

THE novel, said F. Marion Crawford in an ami- 
able moment, is a species of entertainment. 
Could anything be more diverting than a re- 
mark so incredibly old-fashioned from a gentleman 
whose cosmopolitanism was the marvel of his genera- 
tion? Things have changed and the novel is no longer 
even new, if one remembers that age is seldom defined 
in centuries. A man does not have to be a contem- 
porary of the pyramids in order to be thought elderly, 
and there are no living creatures in geology. When 
Richardson and his brethren began to issue lengthy 
prose narratives, they handled a literary form which 
was as vigorous and almost as incorrigible as a child. 
That to the stirring chain of incidents they added a 
moral was due to a convention which they inherited 
from all story-tellers since the beginning. The aes- 
thetes notwithstanding, no stories of consequence any- 
where have been told for the mere sake of narrative; 
not even Sir Walter, who held the moral effect of novels 
in low esteem, could escape being almost the author of 
an ethical revolution. Nevertheless, the ante-modern 

208 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 209 

story, with its eye on the individual, made very little 
pretense at social lecturing; it probably did not think 
itself old enough to teach in public. When Dickens 
preached it was like buttonholing the neighbors and 
decidedly not like arguing with humanity; Thackeray 
said a great deal to the Gentle Reader but scarcely 
anything to the nation. 

The later novel, however, is nothing if not social. 
What is the problem propounder from Victor Hugo to 
Patrick MacGill, what are the great Russians, if not 
reformers of civilization? When in the twilight of the 
great classic period of the English novel George Eliot 
veiled her characters in the sage and sad outlook of 
the Positivist, something happened to fiction the im- 
portance of which has never been sufficiently recognized. 
Henceforth men would no longer read a story and be 
bored with the moral; they would read morality and 
be bored with the story. The novel, bespectacled and 
sitting with the elders, would talk philosophy. It is 
possible to enjoy Richardson greatly and at the same 
time consider him an ass ; it is, very likely, impossible 
to relish George Moore under the same conditions. 
Genuine enthusiasm for Joseph Conrad is probably 
limited to psychologists; for Mr. Wells to liberals in 
politics; for Gilbert Cannan and John Galsworthy to 
persons who are not enthusiastic about anything. In 
short, the novel is as wise in its old age as the Sphinx, 
and for the sake of decency the word ought to be 
changed. Of course there are honourable exceptions 
like Thomas Hardy, whose mournful views of life are 
inserted in the ancient manner and may comfortably 
be neglected. But in general there is no gainsaying the 
fact that the modern novelist is an educator; he may 



210 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

be expected to break off a love scene at any moment to 
write a history of the world or a treatise on business 
efficiency. In America he is vigorously exhorted to tell 
the truth and is often vehemently accused of — fiction. 
Whether we like it or not, the modern novel is the 
great medium of philosophic propaganda, and should 
be accepted as such. One may speak indeed of the 
narrative art ; there are even superior people who 
take down shelves of books to discover "how they are 
done." Still, it is for the public that novels are writ- 
ten, for a public which absorbs from them its ideas of 
history and politics, of sociology and religion. And 
the strange truth is that any story which makes a 
point for positive belief is cleverly termed a boresome 
tract, while the pseudo-scientific naturalism of Zola 
and Dreiser, the scented materialism of Gautier and 
D. H. Lawrence, and the pure skepticism of Anatole 
France are labeled unadulterated art. It is an impor- 
tant truth to remember, for so saturated with this 
principle is modern criticism that the course of Catho- 
lic fiction has been very effectively blocked by it. The 
orthodox novelist has quite generally come to be looked 
upon as a bothersome peddler, and while he has not 
greatly minded this, he has often been forced to beg. 
One does not find in Catholic stories the straightfor- 
wardness, the energy, and the beauty that are so mani- 
fest in our poetry, philosophy and history. More 
than any other art, fiction is dependent upon its re- 
ception and the Catholic audience has not been suffi- 
ciently appreciative or discerning. When these ob- 
stacles are borne in mind it will easily be seen that 
the presentation of Catholic life in modern English 
fiction has been surprisingly successful. 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 211 

There is little to be found among Victorian novels 
that has not already been considered. The ancient 
popular traditions of Christendom were revived by 
Dickens; Newman and Wiseman did something to 
bring about a better understanding of religious history. 
"Callista" and "Fabiola," with Miles Gerald Keon's 
forgotten book, "Dion and the Sibyls," were able if 
somewhat staid pictures of primitive Christendom. 
Newman's "Loss and Gain" proved a witty, controver- 
sial narrative of a conversion and later there was a 
similar book by Montgomery Carmichael. In the novels 
of Georgiana Fullerton, English readers met with a 
series of pietistic tales which were not well enough writ- 
ten to earn any large place in literary history. The 
genius of the Catholic revival that grew out of Oxford 
was too seriously concerned with higher spiritual is- 
sues to devote much attention to what was then a spe- 
cies of writing that aimed at amusing people. 

If these books lacked the sparkle of modernity, the 
defect was abundantly compensated for by the novels 
of a most fascinating priest, Robert Hugh Benson. 
His work, as we shall see, was prompted by peculiar 
and special interests which may be summed up here as 
curiosity in the borderlands of life and an appetite 
for magnificence. Benson is the literary descendant 
of two remarkable men who, while vastly different in 
character, had a great deal in common. Joseph Henry 
Shorthouse, author of "John Inglesant," was a mystic 
Quaker who revivified in fiction the idea of sacramen- 
talism. His novels are gorgeous pageants glowing with 
a deep quest for spiritual realities and the instincts of 
mediaevalism. The story of John Inglesant, with its 
colourful historical background and mystical subject, 



212 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

probably influenced Benson more than any other book. 
His other master was Huysmans, the volatile convert- 
mystic of modern French letters, whose Catholic life 
was an intense preoccupation with the transcendental 
aspects of religion, and who surrounded the faith with 
the artistic pomp of a mediaeval court. "En Route" 
and "La Cathedrale" deal with the arcana of belief 
but also with the gorgeous symbolism of worship, with 
music shuddering under dim cathedral arches or rising 
plaintive in Trappist chapels at break of day, and 
with the regal mysteries of architecture. Huysmans' 
life of Saint Lydwine, finally, is a ruthless dissection of 
a martyred soul fettered by a mission of expiation. 
These authors emphasized the things which Benson 
considered the realities of religion: God's hand on the 
unusual soul and the almost unearthly beauty of the 
Catholic ritual. All three were egoists, in varying ways 
of course, but serenely independent of the social life 
about them. Going their journey alone, of necessity 
they had no time for democratic fellowships. The av- 
erage modern reader will therefore be perplexed by 
Benson's books, and certainly they do lack the large 
sympathy with which great novels are imbued; but 
that is the natural consequence of their modernity. 

Some acquaintance with the character of Robert 
Hugh Benson will uncover an unusual individuality. 
The son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury 
and born into a family almost all the members of which 
were devotees of pen and ink, he grew up knowing his 
own mind, not particularly scholarly, and innately 
artistic. Having decided finally to go into orders, he 
was ordained, given a mission, and suffered to enter an 
Anglican community. The story of his conversion to 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 213 

the Church, which was achieved quite suddenly during 
a period of two years, is the subject of his interesting 
book, "The Confessions of a Convert." It would seem 
that his motives were theologically rather ordinary, but 
individually most unusual. He sought the Church be- 
cause his religious inclinations beheld in her dogmatic 
firmness and mystic character the only satisfactory 
support for his personality. No social considerations 
such as moved Bourget, no deep historical research 
like that which impelled Newman to make the step, 
no problems of modern religious criticism, were con- 
cerned. He became a Catholic quite independently of 
the intellectual currents around him, because he was 
himself. 

Of Benson the Catholic priest and the Monsignor it 
it is not necessary to say much here. He proved an 
admirable pulpit orator and a successful spiritual di- 
rector. Even so, he insisted upon going his own way 
and making those investigations into the fringes of 
the supernatural which engrossed his attention. Often 
he was dull about ordinary matters, but a ghost could 
have aroused him at any moment. The details of an 
apparition left him in a state of eager excitement. His 
books were written breathlessly and blithely, without 
any of the deep brooding which gives works of art an 
inward virility that is the pledge of immortality. It 
was an adventure to think them out, to write them 
down; and Benson preserved to his dying day a boy- 
ishness of temperament that, satisfying its zest in un- 
frequented places, had a truly Stevensonian relish for 
experience. He might have agreed with Cotton Mather 
about the reality of the witches, but he would have op- 
posed him on everything else. 



214 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The vivid mind of Benson sought its first literary 
expression in the historical novel. What he tried to 
do, however, was not to outline a great movement or 
to study a period, but to present a striking individual 
who, borne down by the pressure of earthly circum- 
stance, would seek refuge in religion. The past at- 
tracted him by the heroism, the splendid pomp, of its 
setting, and he labored hard to reproduce the actual 
colours. His admirers do not think that he ever wrote 
for the sake of history; he presented history because 
he wished to write and this inspired him. Almost all 
of Benson's novels of this sort deal with periods of 
religious strife — Elizabethan, Tudor, Stuart. "The 
Queen's Tragedy," perhaps the best among them, is 
a story of the futile career of Mary Tudor, made rich 
with elaborate description and fervent with religious 
sympathy. But the interest centers despite all ex- 
traneous incidents on the leading figure; we are made 
to follow closely the real character of Mary, to per- 
ceive how her weakness conspired to thwart all her 
hopes and to render her desperately unhappy. It is 
when the Queen is brought close to death that the 
horizon is lifted and made radiant, and the final scene, 
with its profound interpretation of the ritual, is a 
transcendently moving piece of writing. 

"Oddsfish," probably one of Benson's most popular 
works, is the story of a youthful Papal agent who is 
connected with the court of Charles II. Here the 
character of the king remains somewhat in the back- 
ground, but is the theme of the narrative none the less. 
Round about seethe the torrents of intrigue, the de- 
termined efforts to uproot the Jesuits, to annul Catho- 
lic influence, and to fetter the king. Charles, debonair, 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 215 

intelligent, but debauched and weakened, is presented 
with distinct skill, and manages to preserve his royal 
allurement despite his fatal insouciance. In general, 
the book evidences Benson's genius and its limitations. 
There is a characteristic and regrettable weakness of 
structure, together with a very conventional subordi- 
nate narrative. The author's talent for description 
leads him into paragraphs of detail which do not bear 
upon the issue, and his failure to give the women in the 
story reality makes such love interest as enters rather 
banal. Still, it is the soul of the central figure which 
is Benson's chief concern and he achieves its redemp- 
tion with a glowing sympathy that wins the reader's 
highest admiration. Charles seen in the light of eter- 
nity, with death upon him and the priest by his side, 
is no longer a king but a frightened man; and the 
author is superbly powerful in showing the compara- 
tive value of that manhood. Of various other novels, 
"Come Rack, Come Rope" and-"By What Authority?", 
little could be said that has not already been implied. 
As an historical novelist Benson analyzed certain char- 
acters of great importance from the Catholic point of 
view, and succeeded by reason of imaginative artistry 
and a grasp of the response of a harrowed and solitary 
soul to the faith. 

These two qualities were shown separately in stories 
which gave their author something of an international 
reputation, "Richard Raynal, Solitary" and "The 
Lord of the World." Written with great care and 
with an unusual understanding of word-color, the life 
of Richard Raynal has a quiet grace that works into 
the heart of the reader as its subject must have taken 
possession of the author. Even if it be thought to 



216 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

stand somewhat apart from life in an atmosphere of 
unworldliness, the book is vital and sincere. In "The 
Lord of the World," however, Benson sketched a 
brightly tinted picture of what he fancied the judg- 
ment day would be like. The story has vivid scenery 
and verve, but the imagination conceiving it is osten- 
sibly a bit wild. There is something of Mr. Wells' 
scientific inventiveness about it — something which the 
Germans would term holossal. It is a theme of tre- 
mendous possibilities, but Benson was not Michael 
Angelo and his work is melodrama. Let us risk boldly 
the statement that in these two volumes one will find 
their author at his best and at his worst, but employ- 
ing all his powers. 

Among the novels which Benson devoted to contem- 
porary life, the discriminating reader will find two of 
especial interest. "The Sentimentalists" is able, 
healthy satire far above the average in ability. Chris- 
topher Dell, a dilettante redolent of Walter Pater and 
scented cigarettes, has the faith but no power of will. 
While he may be to some extent the caricature of a 
type, Dell is deftly and interestingly individualized. 
A healthy, common-sense environment having failed 
to save him, recourse is had to Mr. Rolls, a charming 
mystic too reflective and wealthy to be Patmorean, who 
redeems Dell by a surprising expedient. In this book 
Benson succeeds admirably with a group of fascinat- 
ing men, fails utterly with a group of boresome women, 
and makes the point a little too obviously. But though 
the legerdemain is rough in places, it is a good book 
and will bear rereading. 

The superiority of "Initiation" lies, first of all, in 
the selection of a daring and very modern theme: un- 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 217 

merited suffering and its influence on the soul. Sir 
Neville Fanning is a fine young landowner, not reli- 
giously enthusiastic but still thoroughly orthodox in 
comportment. In Rome he meets Enid Bensington, a 
beautiful egoist — unfortunately too beautiful and too 
egoistic — who finally spurns his love with insane 
cruelty. He turns to nature for solace, but soon dis- 
covers that the disease which he has inherited from a 
debauched father is fatal. Face to face with death, he 
sounds the depths of the Catholic faith and draws from 
it not only solace but truth. The exposition of his 
decline is made with a realistic understanding and 
imaginative sympathy almost too beautiful for praise. 
Harrowing though the story be thought, Benson's 
priesthood saves it from the tyrannical ruthlessness of 
a naturalist. 

These books will have indicated sufficiently the range 
of Monsignor Benson's gifts. His novels, like Bour- 
get's, are demonstrations but they are individual in- 
stead of social. The milieux in which the characters to 
be analyzed are placed are nearly always conventional : 
the entourage of royalty in the historical novels and 
dignified country homes in the modern stories. Philo- 
sophically, Benson was an egoist who did not consider 
sufficiently, perhaps, the nature and value of environ- 
ment. Being concerned largely with spiritual cases, 
he never wrote without a religious purpose, and his 
books have some of the atmosphere of a "tract." Nev- 
ertheless, he succeeded in saying things which others 
had neglected, in winning attention by his own interest 
in the subject and by his brilliant skill. Never tire- 
some, he manages in spite of his psychological pre- 
occupations to be normal. A man of intense convic- 



218 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tions, he was not quite enough of an artist to attend 
to the finesse of craftsmanship, but he did honest work 
of which Catholic letters cannot be too proud. 

The biographer of Monsignor Benson, Father C. C. 
Martindale, is himself an occasional novelist. In "The 
Goddess of Ghosts" and "The Waters of Twilight" he 
has written two very striking studies of religious tem- 
perament, which the average reader may find dull but 
in which the discerning person will rejoice. It must 
be borne in mind that Father Martindale is a stylist 
of the school of Pater, writing sentences that turn 
round queer corners and manage to say things by sug- 
gestion rather than by statement. There is about his 
two little books a subtlety of conception and a rich- 
ness of meaning that are surprisingly educative with- 
out being in the least unctuous. "The Goddess of 
Ghosts" studies the differences between the Catholic 
and the Greek spirit in action. The author, who is a 
famous classical scholar, succeeds in giving to his deli- 
cately rhythmical prose the odour of distant schools of 
thought, and brings together in a quiet Breton garden 
the ends of the spiritual earth. Pater, had he been a 
Catholic, might have done this very thing, but it would 
not have been better work than his disciple's. "The 
Waters of Twilight" is an interesting resume of a 
phenomenally clever Englishman's religious opinions. 
They exhibit nuances of spiritual sensibility which 
cannot fail to delight the lover of such things. It may 
be an error to speak of Father Martindale as a novelist, 
for his books adhere to the vague form set by "Marius 
the Epicurean." Painstaking in their treatment of 
almost intangible ideas, they occupy a corner of their 
own in modern Catholic letters. 



BOBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 219 

It is almost disconcerting to descend from these lofty 
rooms of thought to the honest commonplaceness of 
John Ayscough, who is, as everybody ought to know, 
Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew and despite his priest- 
hood the literary brother of Anthony Trollope and 
Archibald Marshall. The author of a formidable 
array of books, John Ayscough is often guilty of writ- 
ing for the sake of penmanship or rather for money 
to be expended philanthropically. His best work, 
however, is blessed with genial qualities that Alphonse 
Daudet or Mrs. Gaskell would have hastened to endorse. 
Marching comfortably along in the realm of platitudes, 
he describes the scenery and the people with soft, easy 
sentences that succeed by reason of a genuine whim- 
sicality and shy humor. If it is necessary to present 
some exceptional person, saint or sinner, one may be 
sure that the author will render him quite tractable 
before the chapter is done. The hard egoism of mod- 
ern letters seems to have fostered in John Ayscough 
the praiseworthy desire to be childlike; only, like all 
plebeian things, this is apt to prove a little dull at 
times. One is afraid that Monsignor Drew, despite 
his valiant priesthood, has retreated from the modern 
turmoil to a charming position that no longer exists. 

Such a book as "San Celestino" may be termed a 
novel because it is a picture of manners, but it is really 
the life of a saint. Considered from the hagiogra- 
phical point of view the book is admirable, for it em- 
phasizes just what the average saint's story fails to 
present: the amiable humanity of the subject. Petruc- 
cio, the mystic Italian lad who becomes Fra Pietro 
the hermit and finally Pope Celestine, is made very un- 
derstandable, though the iron in his soul is not melted 



220 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

away. As a study of society, however, "San Celes- 
tino" leaves much to be desired, despite the pains- 
taking historical accuracy and picturesque charm of 
the narrative. The fierce Italian spirits of that riot- 
ous century are softened until they nearly blur. The 
best of the characters, like the best in Ayscough's other 
books, are those whose foibles make them subjects for 
quaint satire. What deftness the author's hand shows 
here! Pompous little ecclesiastics, so sure of their 
learning and position, provoke the most charitable -of 
smiles. Written without the faintest trace of cruelty, 
the book is delightfully kind and yet spiritually in- 
tense. It is easily John Ayscough's most impressive 
achievement. 

In "Fernando" and "Gracechurch" we are^given two 
partly autobiographical studies of English country 
life. Not many stories of boyhood are so quiet and 
devoid of noisy pranks as "Fernando." The lad grows 
up in the midst of a leisurely environment which does 
not conduce to thrilling adventure, but does provide a 
host of odd, interesting people. They appear, one by 
one, for a moment and then disappear, as in a dream. 
This languid haze tempers their characters, but they 
all have character. Fernando's mother is an exquisite 
Victorian woman even though she is Irish. "Grace- 
church," a sequel, chronicles life in a small town with 
the fine taste of "Cranford," but rambles disconcert- 
ingly and draws attention to its author's woeful in- 
ability to construct narrative. There is absolutely 
nothing in it that resembles an adventure or an in- 
trigue. What gives the book colour and interest is 
the genuine, delicate humour of the telling, a humour 
that is like a smile, without a touch of boisterousness 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 221 

or a desire to be brilliant. In addition, the story is 
spiritualized by a temperate vision of the faith which 
gains the hero's heart. Keble might have written just 
such a book had he possessed the twinkling spirit of 
Charles Lamb. 

It would seem that John Ayscough served a long 
apprenticeship in the craft of writing, during the 
period of which he sought advice from the leading 
novelists of the modern time. "Dromina," at all 
events, is a book resembling so closely George Mere- 
dith's "Harry Richmond" that one suspects the like- 
ness of having been deliberate. Gypsies appear from 
Romany with beguiling ways and mysterious customs ; 
there is an eccentric if delightful Irish father, and a 
family of entertaining young people. The adventure 
leads to the establishment # of a surprising West Indian 
kingdom and the martyrdom of the idealistic young 
ruler. Improbable and incoherent as the story is, the 
romantic atmosphere has the flavor of Meredith's 
happy book, its smell of woodland smoke and strange 
enchantment of scene. "Hurdcott" strikes the reader 
as a rather poor approximation to Hardy's "Tess 
of the d'Urbervilles." There is a queer young shep- 
herd whose antecedents are unknown and who is sus- 
pected of undesirable qualities. Though he is a child 
of nature he manages to win the affections of a charm- 
ing young lady, but is falsely accused of murder and 
sentenced to death. The mystic resignation of his 
fiancee is just a little too exalted for reality, and the 
catastrophe is too exactly the opposite, in spirit, of 
the grim finale of Tess. The book has fine rustic 
scenes and characters, but it is evident that the author 
gasps for air. 



222 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

John Ayscough merits attention as the representa- 
tive in literature of an attitude towards life that is 
both humorous and deeply religious. Fascinated with 
the spirit of rural Italy, as several of his books show, 
he applied its standards to the English life he knew 
and loved. It is unnecessary to say that he moves out- 
side the busy currents of national affairs. No one 
would fancy from a reading of his books that there 
are such things as industrialism, an East Side, spirit- 
ism, or eugenics. His way of revolt against these 
details has apparently been to ignore them. Coveting 
peace, he looks at the world where it is bathed in a 
beneficent twilight, busy with little, heart-holding com- 
edies and tragedies, conscious of no economic or social 
problems and content to be, simply, the world. It is a 
philosophy which can be scorned, but which is redeemed 
from commonplaceness by its firm hold on the now un- 
common art of laughter. 

It is significant that the three novelists just consid- 
ered should have been clergymen and converts who 
brought their Oxford training into the service of the 
Church. Few other men would have mustered suffi- 
cient energy to undertake the difficult and slightly 
rewarded task of Catholic fiction. They were aided, 
however, by an intelligent and artistic woman, Mrs. 
Wilfrid Ward. Moving freely in cultivated circles 
and interested in the work of her husband, she brought 
to novel writing a thorough acquaintance with the 
environment with which she wished to deal. Religious 
influences are never lost sight of, although she treats 
them as social forces and not as matters of contro- 
versy. Gifted with a great deal of Jane Austen's skill 
in unfolding the intimacies of a situation, she has 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEI, 223 

Bourget's view of the worth of the novel as a critique 
of institutions. "Out of Due Time," like the "Robert 
Elsmere" of another Mrs. Ward, is a study, from the 
Catholic point of view, of the relations existing between 
theology and the positive sciences, and has the limited 
merits of all stories written about and during a "move- 
ment." Her latest novel, "Not Known Here," is in 
many ways her best : it is a sincerely poignant narrative 
concerning a man of German extraction who lives in 
England and is ostracized during the war. The theme 
is one which has the sort of possibilities that may easily 
be bungled; to say that Mrs. Ward has succeeded is 
to restrain praise to the freezing-point. 

Many critics are of the opinion that while she is not 
one of the most widely-known Catholic novelists, she is 
almost the best of them. For delicately devised situa- 
tions, subtle and strong characterization, and fine, 
sharp-pointed style she is notable ; her books have been 
done while so many others have merely been written. 
Probably the most popular of her tales, "One Poor 
Scruple" may seem a study of marriage from the 
Church's point of view, in which Madge O'Reilly is 
tempted to accept Lord Bellasis in spite of his living 
and disreputably divorced wife, but it is really a diver- 
sified and remarkably perceptive study of modern 
woman. Janet Riversdale and her budding daughter 
Hilda, Laura Hurstmonceaux, the manipulator of 
social alliances, Cecilia the thoroughly modern, and 
Mary Riversdale the mystic, are not figures in black 
and white wood, but living creatures with emphasis on 
their minds rather than on their hysterics. Some of 
the men are charming, too, but one feels that Mrs. 
Ward has done her best with women and proved them 



224 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to have souls, a matter which a dispassionate sur- 
vey of recent fiction would seem to deny. 

No list of the English Catholic novelists would be 
complete without a mention of Francis Marion Craw- 
ford who, by reason of birth, belongs really to Ameri- 
can letters. Nevertheless, because of his cosmopolitan- 
ism and essentially narrative gifts he shall be suffered 
to intrude here where there is room for him. Craw- 
ford, a hard student of history and Sanskrit, tumbled 
into fiction quite by accident, and while undervaluing 
the art paradoxically succeeded in it. Religion was 
the most serious concern of his life and he did not often 
talk of it in work which he believed was intended for 
idle-hour amusement. It may be that the lack of pas- 
sion so apparent in his novels was due to this strange 
and misguided reserve. An admirable romancer, able 
to conjure up an atmosphere with amazing skill, and 
familiar with so many sides of cosmopolitan life, Craw- 
ford failed just where the best novelists succeed: in the 
creation of dynamic characters. Dickens, for instance, 
could present people who might reasonably be expected 
to go on doing equally entertaining things outside their 
book; Thackeray's Becky, we are sure, had many an 
adventure which her sponsor did not find it necessary 
to relate. In short, the masters of fiction have given 
their creatures enough life to carry them through life. 
Crawford's people seem to lack this abounding vitality, 
to be fit for books only. When this has been said, 
however, criticism of his craftsmanship must cease, and 
one bows to the miracle of his narrative instinct. 

As has been stated, his artistic effort was not often 
concerned with his Catholic belief. Such stories as 
"Greifenstein" and "Mr. Isaacs" touch no philosophy 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 225 

of life very closely, and numerous others are pastels of 
love or some other passion. The great Saracinesca 
trilogy may be considered a contribution to the liter- 
ature of Christendom, as a romantic presentation of 
the collapse of the Papal power. In addition to the 
splendid intrigue of the narrative there is a world of 
really valuable social information : the viewpoint of the 
great Roman families, the religious atmosphere of the 
city, and the industrial changes which came in with 
the new era. Unfortunately, the power of the first 
book, "Saracinesca," is not maintained, and while it 
stands a good chance of being read for many years, 
the others are already forgotten. 

Nor is one likely to be deeply impressed by such 
books as "Marzio's Crucifix" and "The White Sister," 
into which Crawford ventured to inject considerable 
Catholic sentiment. The spirituality of these vol- 
umes is unmistakably deserving of the word "pretty"; 
and the effeminacy of their outlook is a denial of the 
stern position which Christianity occupies in modern 
life. The tirade of a somber man like Huysmans 
against the insincerity of doctoring the faith for popu- 
lar consumption is relentless but also irresistible. How 
much better, both as a story and as a view of life, is 
that romantic novel "Casa Bracchio," a work of con- 
summate narrative skill and insight into life ! The 
dark moods of the Italian temperament burst into livid 
fire, nature is aglow with responsive gleams, and the 
whole story moves to its conclusion with the masterly 
unison of Hardy's best tales. Crawford did nothing 
better ; it is a memorable novel. 

It would seem that Marion Crawford was a man 
who knew exactly what he was expected to do, rather 



226 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

than a genius striving to impress upon the world the 
things he had been born to say. A fine, tactful student 
of men, his scholarly instincts made for absorption 
rather than transcendent analysis. No one knew more 
of Italian life than he did, although he thought it 
unnecessary to repeat everything he had found out. 
A manifold reflector of the pageant, he selected with 
nice discrimination what he fancied the public would 
like to hear. His readers were generous, graceful, and 
tolerant of convention ; he believed it quite sufficient to 
entertain them without emphasizing his individuality 
in the manner of Stendhal. Crawford failed to be the 
great Catholic novelist because he did not foresee the 
social power that the novel would come to exercise and 
because he practiced too rigorously the discipline of 
the secret. 

While these names are the most important, there are 
others of interest to the lover of the Catholic note in 
fiction. The brilliant work of Canon William Barry, 
an essayist with a startling synthetic grasp of history, 
is best shown in "Arden Massiter" and "The Two 
Standards." Written about a time when strong social 
forces were ebullient and unsteady, these novels view 
history as the reflex of human passion, as a record 
marred by desire. The ambitious verve of such books 
is easily contrasted with the quiet, comely art of Leslie 
Moore, whose "Peacock Feather" is fine vagabondish 
romance and whose other books, such as "The Desired 
Haven," have the natural piety of De Vere and a 
tranquil humour that recalls the work of Peacock. 
Something interesting might also be said about the 
work of John Oliver Hobbes, and a score of eager 



ROBERT HUGH BENSON AND THE AGING NOVEL 227 

writers like M. E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell), 
Isabel Clarke, and Theodore Maynard. 

English Catholic fiction has just begun. Now that 
the novel has taken on a new meaning and become the 
conduit of social speculation, it must not be allowed 
to fail as a weapon in the battle for Christendom. 
Our authors must learn how to respond to the impulses 
stirring in the present world, how to freshen their art 
with unfettered vitality, and above all how to drama- 
tize their philosophy. The upheaval upon which con- 
temporary life is based, the seething of delusion and 
the rolling of rebellious drums, must not find Catholic 
art in a distant upland country whence the din of these 
things is barred by convention. We are born of sterner 
stuff than that. There must be an eagerness for the 
heroic in this wilderness where all but the mightiest 
valour quails, and a concern for beauty even in the 
mire of a tumbling civilization. Story-telling merges 
ideals in life, and the common people have loved it 
because they have always followed leaders rather than 
abstractions. No novelist can be great until he has 
become an artist ; and no artist is worth talking about 
unless he can rebuild his dreams from the stuff of life. 

There is one thing more. The great writer is natu- 
rally not made to order, but he cannot appear unless 
there is a demand for him. Readers must learn to read 
with discrimination, not to praise a book merely be- 
cause it is Catholic and also not to heed the silence 
of hostile criticism and ignore a book because it be- 
lieves in the soul. It is consoling and salutary to 
remember that in the background are the great Chris- 
tian masters of modern Continental fiction — French, 



228 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

German, Spanish, Italian, Polish — who have solved the 
problems of an inimical environment and who have 
much to say that we can use to our great profit. To 
release our fiction from provincialism of outlook and 
parochial feebleness of handling, to make it truly rep- 
resentative of the Catholic pulse in the world, is the 
task that confronts both our creative art and our 
criticism. 

BOOK NOTE 

Robert Hugh Benson is noteworthy also as a religious essayist; 
F. M. Crawford has written charming volumes of history; John 
Ayscough is an essayist as well as a novelist; William Barry and 
C. C. Martindale have done much work of a scholarly character. 
Reviews of fiction by the writers discussed in this chapter may be 
found in quantity in the Tablet, the Athenaeum, the Dublin Review, 
and the Catholic World. For information concerning Benson, see 
"Hugh: a Memoir," by A. C. Benson; "Robert Hugh Benson," by 
C. C. Martindale; and his own "Confessions of a Convert." On 
Crawford see "A Diplomat's Wife in Many Lands," by Mrs. Hugh 
Fraser; "The Art of Fiction," by Bliss Perry, and "The Cam- 
bridge History of American Literature." 



CHAPTER THIRTEEN 

THE ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST : G. K. CHESTERTON 

"A sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to 
rust." James Stephens. 

IN these days we are so accustomed to the melan- 
choly remark that the journalist is making the 
library obsolete that we often overlook his really 
stupendous effort to create a library. Defoe was a 
journalist and so was Pickens; Steele, Goldsmith, 
Johnson, Thackeray, Kipling — one after another the 
fathers of large families of healthy books have been 
inseparable from the newspaper. They have seen no 
reason why writing that is new to-day should not be 
just as surprising on Doomsday; they have remem- 
bered, with a chuckle, that the word "press" may mean 
a receptacle in which to keep things of price. This, 
however, is not the place to discuss journalism in gen- 
eral, or even that service of the Catholic Spirit which 
has been the aim of a devoted and constantly improving 
press. We have instead the much more difficult task 
of inspecting the testimony of a single man, who is a 
person of such divergent activities that summarizing 
them is like trying to put the adventures of a normal 
boy into a paragraph. 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is too very much alive for 
anything like an estimate of his genius ; a coherent im- 

229 



230 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

pression of his utterances would in fact have the same 
simplicity as a panorama of the birds of the air. But 
just as the birds are subject to a few general laws, 
so one may assert without temerity a number of facts 
about the writings of Chesterton. First of all, he is 
popular: his remarks are common property, his por- 
trait needs so signature, and about none of these things 
is there an attitude of disdain for the opinions of the 
mob. Chesterton has talked religion to enormous audi- 
ences with the understanding that he himself is in the 
audience; having learned that citizenship is a mixture 
of action and thought, he has spoken of literature and 
politics in the same breath; finally, he has changed 
the romance into an editorial and the leading article 
into a fairy tale. In the second place, he is an English- 
man fighting for England. This means so many things 
that we shall content ourselves here with stating what 
it does not mean : conquering heathens or Irishmen, for- 
getting that history was once contemporary, and be- 
lieving that an intelligent man is never seen on the 
street. Both of these primal principles have led to the 
acceptance of a more important third, the champion- 
ing of the Catholic Spirit with surprising vigor and 
freshness. 

The result of such comparatively simple things is a 
tremendous influence which nobody will deny. Fun- 
damentally, of course, it is not an influence which 
settles anything, but rather one which unsettles every- 
thing; for Chestertonian literature is a protest. It 
arose from the midst of a crowd which, having ac- 
cepted the modern dictum that there are no natural 
laws, began to feel the iron laws of nature; it spoke 
out at a moment when the stoical agnosticism of Hux- 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST: G. K. CHESTERTON 231 

ley had been weakened by the plague of decadence; 
it laughed aloud on the very evening when the intel- 
lectual world was on its way to a philosophic funeral. 
The missing link had made the London skeptic feel 
the weight of all the years and all the glaciers of 
science, and talk began to circulate about various 
drugs that might be applied to senile society. Those 
were days when, in the mystic shadows which no eye 
can pierce, the later War of Europe was brewing like 
a shuddering storm; when men decayed in the midst 
of the poisonous philosophies which they had planted 
round about them, yet dreamed that they had never 
been so secure or so remarkably right. The challenge 
of Chesterton was a recruiter's trumpet sounding the 
things for which men would later stand and die. Those 
things were right at the critical moment because they 
are eternally right; and it is not improbable that the 
future will base the fame of Chesterton primarily upon 
this service and this discovery. 

As has been suggested, the career of the man is suf- 
ficiently well known to dispense with a detailed biogra- 
phical note. Chesterton was born in Kensington in 
1874* to a father who painted and wrote poetry in a 
minor way. The son contributed art criticisms and 
poems to the magazines, and in 1900 "The Wild 
Knight" was published. His real activity began, how- 
ever, when he joined the staff of the Daily News as an 
editorial writer; here he remained until the fact that 
his opinions were exactly opposed to all those cham- 
pioned by the paper became too obvious for his con- 
science. Beyond the routine of a literary life, Chester- 
ton has been active as a debater on social topics, as a 
traveler, and, during the war, as a moral force rather 



232 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

than as the tower of physical strength which assuredly 
he wished to be. His enormous figure has been cari- 
catured and admired in every part of the world, and 
those people whom he had not forced to thought he 
has at least stirred to laughter. There is really only 
one strange thing in his honourable career: the fact 
that, while he is a Catholic in every part of his phi- 
losophy, he is actually a member of the Anglican 
church. 

The literary output signed by the famous initials 
G. K. C. is so enormous that the limits of this chapter 
would hardly suffice for its enumeration, but a great 
deal of it is journalism, well-made but fashioned 
frankly for the moment. Conceive of Shakespeare as 
the author not only of the plays now attributed to him 
but also of various occasional pieces which a producer 
might require for a performance or two and which, 
while revealing the master's hand, would be compara- 
tively unfinished. These might well have lines of beauty 
and passages worth noting, but one could arrive at a 
knowledge of the poet's principles and moods without 
referring to them. So it is with Chesterton ; his repre- 
sentative books reveal the man sufficiently to justify 
an estimate that is based exclusively upon them. 

He was and is chiefly a poet, although the bulk of 
his verse is not large. Your true singer is always 
democratic, whether he be Dante engrossed in popular 
politics, or Verlaine who cannot keep away from les 
gens trop mdulgents. What enabled Chesterton to 
discover the beauty of common things and to pierce 
the mummery of the cultivated egoist was first and last 
his poet's gift, and this has kept him fresh and free. 
Learning from such divergent masters as Whitman and 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST I G. K. CHESTERTON 233 

Macdonald the democracy of miracles, he found them 
plentiful in England. The challenge, the satire, of 
"The Wild Knight" is a voice from the streets in a 
drawing-room where everybody is bored to death. 
Chesterton in this book was something like one of those 
fiercely brilliant young men who began the Revolution 
in France : he did not quite know what he wanted, but 
he was certain of what he did not want. This instinc- 
tive rebellion against smug intellectualism and smug 
squalor is responsive for many later poems, such as the 
delightful songs of Roundabout in "The Flying Inn," 
and the more satiric "Ballades Urbane." In these one 
finds the Chesterton who stands for beer and merri- 
ment, the Chesterton who is never so gay as when his 
enemies have hedged him round. 

"The Ballad of the White Horse" is an ambitious 
poem that contains a great number of the best things 
its author has to say. Founded upon the popular 
traditions of King Alfred, the tale becomes symbolic 
of the contest which Chesterton is most interested in: 
the constant battle between Christendom that came 
from Rome and the heathens who have remained out- 
side. The inspiration and the vigour of expression are 
alike remarkable. A simple ballad stanza is deftly 
interwoven with supple rhythms and iridescent diction, 
while the sweep of the narrative is sustained by a series 
of lyric stanzas that are strong or tender, that snatch 
at the heart or carry it aloft. More important even 
is the characterization. Alfred the Great, anxious to 
reconquer his kingdom from the invading Danes, goes 
for aid to three men — Eldred, a Saxon, Mark, a 
Roman, and Colan, a Gael. The three represent their 
races as the Danish chieftains are made to typify 



234 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

theirs, and the interpretative sympathy of the author 
marks the poem as the one great English epic of the 
twentieth century. The symbolism inherent in the 
story will not escape the attentive reader. It reveals 
the character of the eternal contest between heathen 
and Christian with the subtle insight of perfect 
music, giving to each side its due but deciding the vic- 
tory with magnificent fervour. "The Ballad of the 
White Horse" is a poem to love and even to sing, which 
are more important matters than putting it on a shelf 
and calling it great. 

There are many people, however, who will continue 
to find Chesterton's most interesting poem in "Le- 
panto." This foreshortened epic, rich with lines that 
are lyrics in themselves, is made of haunting battle 
music through which runs a prayer. It might be 
termed the story of Mahound's defeat and the Christian 
victory, or it might be called a simple battle ballad. 
The great and the small are here found side by side, 
under the symbolic banner of Don Juan of Austria, 
whose chivalry dominates the struggle with the magic 
glamour of Roland. Here is a new verse-form, too — 
organic rhythm employed with a mastery that no other 
poet has achieved. English literature has little to com- 
pare with it and the strange, elemental effect of many 
lines rivals the best efforts of the French symbolists. 
But Chesterton is a love-poet and a religious poet also, 
some of whose lyrics achieve the lowly loveliness, the 
towering abasement, of Donne and Vaughan. Always 
and everywhere he is the singer who gains the crest of 
song because he has seen the little things among which 
he wanders ; who chants the wassail in a world that 
seems young because he himself is a boy. 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST: G. K. CHESTERTON 235 

Yet Chesterton's verse, genuine and fascinating 
though it be, is only a fragment of his work as a poet. 
He has carried the same imaginative gifts into prose 
and, in a series of romances that are virtually alle- 
gories, has drawn pictures in paragraphs that resemble 
stanzas. "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" is the 
earliest of them and in many ways the most beguiling. 
Auberon Quin, a genuine humourist, has been chosen 
king in 1984 by alphabetical rotation, and his first 
official order is to the effect that all the boroughs of 
London shall be surrounded with walls and guarded by 
mediaeval-looking provosts and their halberdiers. Adam 
Wayne, the Provost of Notting Hill, is enough of a 
fanatic to believe that his borough, and indeed his little 
street, are matters of sovereign importance. He re- 
fuses to permit the destruction of the street, wagers 
battle in its behalf, and by a series of ruses actually 
manages to set up the Empire of Notting Hill. Later 
this waxes fat and insolent and is crushed by neigh- 
bours who have emulated its example. Auberon Quin 
and Wayne then set forth on a tour of the world. Thus 
proceeds the Chestertonian story, not fiction in the 
ordinary sense of the word, but rather a series of thor- 
oughly extravagant incidents which end in a riot. 
Nevertheless, the tale seems, for the time being, per- 
fectly plausible, and the lesson which underlies it is 
startlingly simple. The author has made of the 
romance an extended paradox, and the reader has only 
to apply the theory of Adam Wayne to the French 
Revolution or the revolt of Ireland to discover how 
true it may be in the world of reality. 

The later romances do not depart widely from the 
method of the first. "The Man Who Was Thursday" 



236 CATHOLIC SPIRIT TN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

is perhaps the most brilliant and difficult of them all. 
The last chapter, which should have explained, really 
jumbles up everything, and the baffled reader is likely 
to cry out in protest. The best thing to do with such 
an one is to send him speedily to "Manalive," one of 
the wittiest and most human books in the entire Ches- 
tertonian repertoire. Innocent Smith, though not 
quite so fascinating as Father Brown the innocent 
detective who antedates him slightly, is a very charm- 
ing person. The story of his fantastic adventures in 
an attempt to make his wife fall in love with him re- 
peatedly, is really a study of the transcendent adven- 
ture of matrimony and of the modern failure to under- 
stand it. This and the other romances, yes, even the 
detective stories, ought to be issued with a commentary 
and footnotes by, say, Mrs. Chesterton. As it is, the 
average person is ready to admit that it must have been 
great fun writing them, but also to wonder why he is 
expected to read them. On the other hand, "Magic," 
a short story which turned into a play, is clarity itself. 
Nothing could be more quotable or in many ways more 
obvious. The Duke is genuinely "a gentleman though 
an ass," the minister a critic of religion, the doctor a 
skeptic, and the conjuror a mystery. The illusion is 
perfect though, as the author explained in the Dublin 
Review, it really hasn't a leg to stand on. "Magic" 
makes the point so admirably that one cannot help 
wishing that other short stories had turned into plays. 
Chesterton the poet is, however, primarily a poet 
with a sword; a poet who is a debater. No man ever 
had a greater fondness for argument or managed it, 
on the whole, with such outstanding success. The 
point about the famous book of protests, "Heretics," 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST! G. K. CHESTERTON 237 

is that the world is full of enemies worth fighting. 
That is probably the most satisfactory reason for 
being a philosopher, or, at least, for worrying about 
philosophy. One of the most characteristic modern 
ideas is that it really doesn't matter what a man be- 
lieves ; and were he to believe in nothing whatever it 
would generally be supposed that his happiness was 
complete. In his book Chesterton "pointed out" (a 
favorite phrase) that it does make a great deal of 
difference what opinions a man holds, particularly if 
he wishes to be happy. The leading exponents of the 
age are analyzed and their limitations set forth with 
a vividness that has made many a reader gasp. Of 
the method with which the argument is conducted some- 
thing will be said later; it is enough to remark here 
that it was by this series of negations that Chesterton 
arrived at an affirmation. 

That "Credo" is uttered vigorously in "Orthodoxy," 
a book that has been largely misunderstood. It is not 
a philosophy but a statement of preference; not a 
handbook of apologetics, but an apology that might 
have been made in a tavern where atheists interrupted 
the speaker constantly. The answers come in flashes 
and are astounding because they are overwhelmingly 
obvious. One of the strangest things about "Ortho- 
doxy" is the fact that its case for dogma hinges on the 
acceptance of Papal Supremacy, which Chesterton has 
not in practice accepted. The most striking thing 
about it is the fervent conviction of the conclusion 
which is easily the most simple and sincere, as well as 
the most impressive and torrential, passage that its 
author has ever written. The later Chesterton is less 
vivacious and more reflective in making his plea. "The 



238 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

New Jerusalem," which under the guise of a trip to the 
Holy Land makes an historical voyage from London 
to Calvary and stops off for a lengthy visit with the 
Crusaders, is a supplement to "Orthodoxy." Together 
they make a very effective statement of the Christian 
position in history and thought. 

Conviction, too, has governed the vast amount of 
literary criticism signed by Chesterton. His books on 
Browning, Watts, and the Victorian Age have taken 
their places among standard works of the kind, have 
been appraised favorably and otherwise, but have all 
been distinguished by resolute determination not to dis- 
solve the art of utterance from the thought that must 
precede utterance. They have taken boisterous issue 
with the aesthete. Perhaps the most characteristic of 
these volumes is "Notes on Charles Dickens," virtually 
a series of prefaces to the novels. With the author of 
"Pickwick Papers" Chesterton has much in common : in 
fact, it often seems that when he speaks of the "mob" 
he has in mind a great crowd of Dickens people rather 
than any assemblage that might really gather in Lon- 
don today. Nobody has ever said so well the things 
which actually matter about Dickens ; and one could 
go further and declare that these "Notes" are almost 
indispensable to a proper understanding of their 
author himself. 

What has been the central purpose of this giant lit- 
erary enterprise? Many people have replied that the 
Chestertonian attack on beliefs so tranquilly enter- 
tained by modern illuminati is simply reactionary and 
perverse. On the other hand, hundreds of young men 
not too reactionary or perverse are sure that it is ac- 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST: G. K. CHESTERTON 239 

tuated by a firm and high resolve. To begin with, 
Chesterton's success may be attributed largely to his 
amazing discovery of the ordinary. While the intel- 
lectuals were talking over their books of progress, 
efficiency, the Inner Light, and the higher this or that, 
the "man in the street" was talking about life. He 
remembered the forgotten and invaluable truth that 
two and two are four; he was gay with the obvious 
and joyful things, like wine and prayer, while his cul- 
tivated neighbour was sitting with great seriousness 
in a melancholy library. It was Chesterton's luck as a 
poet to meet this common man; like Socrates he went 
down the road asking questions which the professors 
had declared unanswerable and discovered that every- 
body could answer them. The earth turned out to be 
a palace of awful beauty wherein a man should go down 
on his knees before a glade of grass. It was a gay 
business, too, that had its root in laughter; for mirth, 
as well as awe, is an announcement of the discovery of 
the unexpected, and the distance between the two is 
proverbially slight. Thus a man laughs when a girl 
loses her garter but is dumb when, like Hardy's Tess, 
she loses her head. Chesterton, afire with the reality 
of this forgotten world, puzzled the educated alike with 
his jollity and his worship: many of them shook their 
heads and asked him to be serious and others smilingly 
called him a fool. It was another case of class-con- 
ciousness. 

What all these people really saw in the author of 
"Heretics" and "Orthodoxy" was something hard to 
see, something that for lack of a better word is called 
mystical. Every sort of theosophic nonsense has been 
associated with the term, but for Chesterton it means 



240 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

understanding by analogy, something like reading the 
advertisements of God. It is the reasonableness which 
unseats reason, the common sense which transcends the 
sensible. The mystic, believing in God, sees the world 
as a garden bright with flowers that are tokens of His 
love, but he need not forget that it is the world. Ches- 
terton finds that the universe is democratic, and man- 
kind "the million masks of God." The elusiveness of 
every natural thing emphasizes the will, almost the 
willfulness, of The Master and the man. Philosophy 
becomes a gay sacramentalism, making joyous obeis- 
ance to wonder and to war. 

Impelled by this insight into the forgotten mystery 
of things, Chesterton has been a life-long defender of 
the Faith. He fights for liberty by relying steadfastly 
on dogma, just as a patriot might struggle for his 
country from ancient battlements of stone. Because 
the democratic society, the many-sided life, and the 
full religion demanded by the manifold temperament of 
man have been the ideals of the Church, and because 
civilization was saved and sanctified and brought to its 
best bloom by her efforts, he upholds the Church and 
her history, particularly the magnificent history of the 
Middle Ages. A common error avows that being a 
mediasvalist implies of necessity a retrogression, 
whereas it is simply a straightforward assertion of 
confidence in human progress. If society as it was 
formed by Greece and Rome had any goal, manifestly 
it was the thirteenth century in which all the elements 
of antique culture were made socially effective. The 
alternative is to believe that the worth-while history of 
man began with Martin Luther and not with the 
Saviour, that Christianity was founded for the sake of 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST: G. K. CHESTERTON 241 

higher criticism and wireless telegraphy; it is to assert 
that society is now sane and that the ages have yearned 
for the culture of Henry Ford and Hugo Stinnes. It 
has seemed impossible to the religious and democratic 
mind of Chesterton that the modern course is right, 
primarily because nobody really believes that it is 
right ; but here again he is too much of a fighter to be 
intimately concerned with the details of the reestablish- 
ment of Christendom. His social program is as hazy 
as a revolutionary patriot's idea of the constitution 
of his liberated country. Chesterton feels that Social- 
ism is wrong because it is a negation of freedom and 
therefore of a fact; that German philosophy is wrong 
because it denies the reality of Rome; and that Irish- 
men are right because they affirm the existence of 
Ireland. He has blazed the trail with laughter and 
battle, but is content that the land of promise shall 
remain the land of dreams. 

It is interesting at this point to consider the re- 
lation of Chesterton to other defenders of the Catholic 
Spirit. One cannot resist the impression that he is 
deeply indebted to Newman, despite the gulf which lies 
between the style of "Orthodoxy" and that of the 
"Apologia." Both are concerned primarily with the 
skeptics, whose principles they can state with remark- 
able clearness, and both wage war with evidences that 
are personal and complex but none the less realistic. 
Newman's almost instinctive attraction to Catholic life 
and history is, when one makes the necessary allowance 
for differences of vocation, very similar to the religion 
of Chesterton. The two are alike once more in cease- 
less effort and versatility of form. Naturally there 
are divergencies; Newman, ascetic and meditative, 



242 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

craved celibacy and contemplation, stood even in his 
writings at some distance from the crowd. Chesterton, 
akin to the robust, democratic spirt of Dickens, has 
believed in love and song, has cherished the lusty brava- 
does of the mob. It may not stretch the distinction 
too far to say that while Newman venerated the Chris- 
tian Fathers, Chesterton has been fascinated by the 
fathers of Christians. 

Another sort of relationship is discernible between 
Coventry Patmore and the author of "Manalive" and 
"The Man Who Was Thursday." In these books 
Chesterton is perhaps nearest to being a mystical 
poet concerned with understanding the tumultu- 
ous pursuit of God's love, which is the consuming 
theme of "The Unknown Eros" and particularly of 
the kindlier lyrics like "Toys" and the "Departure." 
Neither would it be extremely difficult to trace a parallel 
between "What's Wrong with the World" and "Religio 
Poetae," although the fierce democracy of the one is at 
war with the intense egoism of the other. To select an 
instance in point, there is the hostility of both to pro- 
hibition. Patmore detested such meddlesome popular 
legislation because it infringes on the liberty of the 
superior man; Chesterton, because it is an attack, by 
another kind of superior man, on the liberty of the 
populace. For both it is not so much the drink that 
matters as the freedom ; not so much the reality as the 
symbol. Here is only another instance of the re- 
markable unity of principle which the Catholic spirit 
may achieve among men of diverse temperaments : Pat- 
more was high and narrow, Chesterton is low and 
broad; together they occupy satisfactorily the three 
dimensions of belief. 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST! G. K. CHESTERTON 243 

No one, however, has influenced Chesterton so pro- 
foundly as his bosom friend, Hilaire Belloc. The 
opinions of this combative historian will be considered 
in the next chapter; it need only be suggested here 
that in numerous ways Chesterton has found them 
good. If his philosophy is wider in "The New Jerusa- 
lem" than in "The Defendant," it is because the social 
views of Belloc have also developed. The abilities of the 
two men are so remarkably complementary that the 
term, "Chesterbelloc," facetiously employed by Ber- 
nard Shaw, really stands for organic unity, for impul- 
sive intuition linked with cold empiricism. The matter 
may be put briefly by saying that Belloc proceeds by 
straight lines, like Roman roads, while Chesterton 
goes to the same place by rainbows. For one, life is 
law; for the other, something like lawlessness. Their 
interdependence will be seen more closely when we 
examine the work of Belloc. 

These comparisons have been made for the benefit 
of those who make the facile assertion that Chesterton 
is not original in ideas. Nobody is, and the only claim 
to superiority is superior company ; what the accusation 
really means is that his literary method is not honest, 
although it is the delight of the present generation. 
This judgment seems quite unfounded. Chesterton's 
perennial ability to see an obvious thing which every- 
body has overlooked is extraordinary because it is 
sincere. No verbal trickery could fashion rows of 
lamp-like sentences that really illuminate (and here is 
the vital matter) not only one side of a question but 
both. The older literature had mastered this secret, 
which is the sum and substance of Shakespeare's genius. 
Cordelia, for instance, is a victim but also a victor; 



244 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Shylock is a villain but also a man; interwoven with 
the sanity of Hamlet is a thread of unreason which 
leads him to his death. Now Shakespeare, who was a 
humanist and concerned with the world as a stage, is 
reflective and inexorable; his reading of life was the 
accepted version, there was no need of proving it to the 
pit. Modern literature, however, is combative, is 
chiefly interested in establishing a philosophy, and 
Chesterton has no other purpose. If he is dealing, 
say, with defeat and wondering why men are often so 
deeply impressed by it, he runs across a maxim which 
declares that if a thing is worth doing it must be done 
well. The answer to his inquiry flashes upon him: "If 
a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly." This 
is the source of the famous paradox, which may become 
simply a mannerism but with Chesterton is usually a 
manner — a way of arriving at truth by looking over 
the shoulder of logic. Again, in "The New Jerusalem" 
there is a discussion of the relation between St. George 
and the Dragon, between faith in moral principle and 
fear of the Demon. Chesterton sees that while science 
has pretty well stripped the Saint's history of legen- 
dary glamour, it has, by psychical research, given a new 
realism to the Dragon ; and he is moved to question the 
general adequacy of complacent logic. The answer 
is again given in a flash: "We never find our religion 
so right as when we find we are wrong about it." How 
well that reveals both sides of the problem! The 
people who accuse Chesterton of being a mere master 
of the paradox are really implying that he is an author 
of the inferior caste of Shakespeare; a philosopher of 
the second-rate quality of Newman. 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST I G. K. CHESTERTON 245 

But the paradox is only one characteristic of the 
Chestertonian style. This is what might be termed 
an early Gothic prose, bedecked with imagery that is 
both lifelike and grotesque, and rhythmical in a way 
that startles and yet pleases the ear. No modern prose 
writer, it may be affirmed, has understood so well the 
power of figurative language. If the making of meta- 
phors be indeed a birthright like the ear attuned to 
immortal music, then Chesterton has been blessed 
abundantly; the whole course of our literature cannot 
show writing that is more closely akin to illuminated 
manuscript. Despite the transient themes and the 
modern ring of the laughter, it is difficult to see what 
contemporary prose is destined to live if it is not Ches- 
terton's. Boys dipping today, for the first time, into 
"Heretics" or "Orthodoxy" find them as fresh as we 
did when they were first published. And it seems not 
at all unlikely that the young people of the future 
will do the same, without bothering very much about 
whether Mr. McCabe or even Mr. Dickinson is a real 
or a fictitious personage. 

Chesterton is, moreover, a writer sufficiently in de- 
mand to be an imperfect, at times even a glaringly im- 
perfect, writer. The point here is not so much that his 
epigrams are frequently overworked, that he misses 
being effective by becoming affected. Nor are we 
concerned immediately with the lack of clarity which 
muffles so many of his stories and essays in a kind of 
tangled dusk. He has never tried to be that master 
of construction who is the ideal of French stylists and 
their disciples. Almost every one of his books is a 
scrapbook, and his unity of composition is best in his 



246 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

natural medium, verse. No one can quarrel justly with 
the construction of "The Ballad of the White Horse" 
or "Lepanto." 

His most noteworthy fault goes deeper: it is a very 
natural overworking of the symbol. When a man be- 
lieves that such and such an institution is a sacrament, 
every detail about it will acquire the character of a 
mystic ceremonial. If one is convinced that marriage 
and the home which it builds are more wonderful, more 
sacred, and more important than an empire, and if one 
sees that woman is the awful goddess of that shrine, 
one cannot help viewing with alarm even the slightest 
compromise between the spirit of these things and the 
world. Therefore Chesterton opposed woman suffrage 
and seemed to many, even among his admirers, stupidly 
conservative. It must be admitted that such opposition 
was close to mere antipathy ; but he meant that the 
whole trend of such movements is wrong, that suffrage 
was only a rung in the ladder which would bring down 
Juliet from her bower and Peggotty from her kitchen 
into a business which in itself is unworthy and which 
will have to be carried on in a better way than by pass- 
ing round bushels of crisp ballots. Chesterton was here 
opposing divorce, eugenics, race-suicide, state control 
of children, the dozen capital sins of domestic life 
which are the result of a false ideal of government and 
the abandonment of Christian morality. Nevertheless 
one feels strongly that the connection between suffrage 
and these things is not so obvious or necessary as 
he would have us believe, and there are other instances 
in Chesterton's journalism of the same stubbornness 
of opinion. 

Other widespread criticisms seem to be based on a 



ADVENTURES OF A JOURNALIST: G. K. CHESTERTON 247 

failure to take the man for what he professes to be. 
When "A Short History of England" appeared, it 
was gravely handled by some critics in a spirit which 
would have been altogether proper for a review of a 
monograph by Lord Acton. They queried very gravely 
whether the author had seen a learned dissertation by 
So and So, a certain bundle of manuscripts in the 
British Museum, and the theories of a Heidleberg 
savant on the genuineness of an early date. Such 
criticism may display the writer's historical learning, 
but it proves him ignorant of history and Chesterton. 
This book, like everything else that its crusading author 
ever wrote, is a summary of the reasons why a man 
should find the national life worth talking about. 
Abstruse familiarity with the exactness of a text is 
useful ; but it will never induce anybody to sing "Eng- 
land, My England," and surely that also is im- 
portant. 

Chesterton would say that it is most important. His 
service, when one looks at it broadly, has not been to 
add to the erudition of the wise, but rather to subtract 
from it. With commendable gusto he has removed 
heaps of learned rubbish that had blocked the windows 
of the world, and has been one of the first to rediscover 
the immemorial scenes, like starlight on the seas, for 
which men have been glad to live and to die. Surely 
there has been enough of pessimism in modern life and 
men are sated with despair. The merriment of the 
English, older than the walls of Rome or the crests of 
Norman kings, has stood in real danger of succumb- 
ing to the last and most ignoble of influences, the pride 
of foreign savants. Chesterton has restored, or at least 
helped to restore, the laughing humility of the common 



248 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

citizen, which is not servitude nor yet pride, but the 
virtue of freedom for which Christendom was founded, 
the virtue of the symbol of Resurrection. In him, 
though the world was going astray with the blind phi- 
losophy of the Germans and the too perceptive art of 
the French, the Englishman came back with the best 
thing he ever possessed. He came back with a laugh. 



BOOK NOTE 

In addition to the published work of Chesterton, see the files of 
the London Daily News, the New Witness, and the Dublin Review. 
Noteworthy criticisms include the following: "G. K. Chesterton," 
by Julius West; "Chesterton: a Biography," Anonymous; and "G. 
K. Chesterton," by J. de Tonquedec (French). See also, "Vic- 
torian Prophets," by Slosson; "On Contemporary Literature," by 
S. P. Sherman; "Uncensored Celebrities," by Raymond; "The End 
of a Chapter," by Shane Leslie; "Chesterbelloc," by Theodore 
Maynard {Catholic World, 1919) ; and a Review of "Orthodoxy" 
in the North American, vol. 189. 



CHAPTER FOURTEEN 

THE ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HIEAIRE BEELOC 

"The founder of the Christians has put into their heads the idea 
that they are brothers." Ltjcian. 

THE mirthful crusading of Gilbert Chesterton 
seems inseparable from a gallant trade like 
journalism; it does not fit in so naturally, for 
instance, with the studious pursuit of history. And 
yet without this pursuit, especially as it has been un- 
dertaken by one of the friends of his bosom, the author 
of "Orthodoxy" could scarcely have conducted his 
campaign. Let it be granted that the historian is 
usually a mole in some library, enchanted or otherwise ; 
but it is not at all necessary that he be a mole. The 
past justly remains for most people a land of varied 
adventure, crowded with places and people that are, 
above everything else, interesting. The historian may, 
therefore, consider himself a benevolent detective whose 
business is just as much human entertainment as it is 
the quest of truth. If, for example, one were to arrive 
for the first time in the city of Chartres at the lonely 
hour which just noses out the dawn, one would see, 
standing like an awful throne in the luminous dark- 
ness, the form of Notre-Dame. It is likely that as the 
bell, which surely is of gold, whispered the time, the 
neighboring streets would fill with the majestic and un- 
fathomable people who once gathered from the sur- 

249 



250 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rounding country to build the cathedral; it is even 
probable that if one's historical imagination were satis- 
factory the structure would seem just to have been 
completed. "Is it not an enormous business merely to 
stand in such a place? I think it is," says Hilaire 
Belloc. 

And here is the first reason why this historian has 
a right to his own corner in modern letters. Belloc 
has looked upon the past not as a record but as a 
reality, as something like a gigantic novel which the 
peoples of the world have actually lived. His outlook 
and method are as fresh and concrete as those of any 
healthy business carried out in early morning. He 
goes to work upon some knotty question much as a 
man might sit down to a puzzle, with a good-humoured 
intentness on solving it. History is a matter of per- 
sonalities and of esprit, at least, if not of the spirit. 
Because of his philosophy, which will be considered 
briefly later on, Belloc brings to the analysis of the 
past what every sane person ought to instil into his 
life: a sense of humour. Perhaps we can bring out 
this side of the man best by recalling the coincidence 
that he was born in 1870, the year when Dickens died 
and France fell. The great novelist divined the truth 
of popular tradition; it is Belloc who verifies it by re- 
fusing to believe that France has fallen. Both are 
ample and robust, but both are quite unflinching on 
the issues for which they really care. 

The next thing to note about Belloc is that he be- 
lieves not only that truth is stranger than fiction but 
that what passes for truth is often more fictitious than 
fiction. His work generally assumes a critical atti- 
tude and he is forever hammering the sophist. This, 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN! HILAIRE BELLOC 251 

too, is in the real spirit of the adventure, for battle is 
what lends zest to the careers of Ulysses and d'Artag- 
nan» Belloc writes history because he is defending the 
central tradition of Europe with the one irresistible 
weapon of experience. Just as his presentation of the 
past is convincing by reason of his sense of its con- 
temporaneousness, so he writes with a constant eye 
on what Professor Perry calls "The Present Conflict 
of Ideals." A large share of Belloc's best work is not 
constructive history at all, but inspection of someone's 
opinions : an inspection made sharply and often accom- 
panied with stern reprimand. There is no compromise 
in his blood. 

Such a manner is natural to the man and his creed. 
Hilaire Belloc is of mixed French and English ancestry, 
and is descended from people who were soldiers and 
artists. As a boy he attended Newman's school at 
Edgbaston, and it is significant that he has defended 
many of the great Cardinal's views. Being a French 
citizen, he served for one year as a driver in a regi- 
ment of artillery stationed at Toul, in northern France. 
After a varied tour of Europe and the United States 
(like Stevenson he married in California) he entered 
Balliol College, Oxford, taking honours in history, to 
the study of which he had intended to devote his life. 
There were reasons, however, why no fellowship was 
awarded him, and after a period of waiting he jour- 
neyed to London for a try at journalism. Very for- 
tunately he got a foothold, made a friend of great 
value in Chesterton, and found a publisher for his 
earlier books. Some of these, it will be remembered, 
were illustrated by G. K. C. Belloc, now a naturalized 
British subject, decided to enter politics and was 



252 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

elected to the House of Commons in 1906. His sturdy 
liberalism made a strong impression and he seemed on 
the threshold of great success; but other principles, 
such as a pronounced anti-Semitism, a radical labour 
policy, and an uncompromising Catholicism, could not 
fail to ruin the career of any modern statesman. Belloc 
retired from the arena, founded the Eye Witness (which 
has since become the New Witness under Chester- 
tonian editorship) and wrote extensively. A large 
part of his ablest writing has been journalistic in 
character and must be sought out in magazines. Dur- 
ing the war his articles and lectures on the military 
aspects of the struggle gained him a wide reputation, 
although as the years dragged on and strategy blurred 
in the labyrinth of trench warfare, this subject was 
stripped of the dramatic definiteness which Belloc is 
most successful in presenting. Of late years he has 
become simply a journalist and literary man who, de- 
spite opinions which are not commonly shared, is looked 
upon as a leading spokesman of English Catholicism. 

What, then, have been the central beliefs of Belloc's 
philosophy? First of all, it would seem, there is a 
strong, confident grasp of the Catholic idea of civiliza- 
tion. We follow our ancestors not in straggling 
groups or individually, but rather socially: we have 
come out of the past in a body. History, therefore, 
is coherently human and not a vast museum of isolated 
specimens. A synthesis of early European civilization 
had been successfully completed in the Roman Empire, 
whose social discipline had steadily pushed back the 
boundaries of barbarism. The Catholic Church, not a 
vague philosophy but a compact organization, pre- 
served the culture of Rome while the rule of Caesar 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HLLAIRE BELLOC 253 

withered away. This Church also undertook the refor- 
mation of Europe by insisting strongly on religion and 
democracy, and succeeded better than any other agency 
in history at the attempt to unify the Western world. 
That unity, however, has been broken up and a num- 
ber of evils have resulted. The obvious thing to do 
is to return to the older faith and to the older social 
order. Acceptance of these must be based in turn 
upon a full recognition of liberty. It will mean the 
end of capitalistic industrialism and the collapse of 
bureaucratic government. It will mean that property, 
which is the pledge of freedom, will be held by the great 
majority of citizens whose rights will be protected 
against class aggression by a strong and popular central 
government. Such a return to mediaeval social prac- 
tice cannot, Belloc is convinced, be wrought by any 
kind of legislation, but must be the result of a new 
state of mind, the will to freedom of a spiritualized, a 
Catholic democracy. 

It will be observed that all this stands in rather vivid 
opposition to the general direction of modern English 
thought. But although Belloc is hardly miserly of 
words in attacking contemporary politics and histori- 
cal doctrine, he is not romantic in any sense of the 
term. If anything he is too rational, too devoid of 
emotion, in his dissection of motives and movements. 
The ordinary man will find in this appeal for a new 
social order much that seems dry and disenchanting. 
Belloc's French mind and training are thoroughly dif- 
ferent from what Britain has become accustomed to 
during the last century. But although he must rank 
with Swift, Patmore, and Samuel Butler in the class 
of writers who cross the grain of the English mind, 



254 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Belloc views social institutions with much of the calm 
common sense and firm reliance on tradition that were 
displayed by Napoleon in the making of the Code Civil. 
It will be recalled that the Emperor decided against 
large estates and for many small ones ; that he upheld 
firmly the Church and such moral institutions as mar- 
riage, and that he smiled at philosophies of the State 
which did not rest squarely upon experience. All of 
this was the view of a bon Frcmpais, but Napoleon 
lacked the religious conviction, the spiritual selflessness, 
that would have made his scheme a revival of the Chris- 
tian age. In teaching the lessons of the past Belloc, 
however, is consistently a belligerent defender of Catho- 
lic ideas. He understands England, too, with the 
clarity of love; no one has written more discerningly 
of her tradition and her beauties, and no one is more 
sincerely concerned with her future. 

The manner which Belloc has chosen for the expres- 
sion of these views is individual. To a great versatility 
— he has mastered nearly every literary form except 
the drama — is added a style that belongs to no one 
else, which combines the wit and clearness of Voltaire 
with the logic of the schools. Invariably he begins by 
stating a thesis which in these times is sure to be war- 
like, much as a revolutionary patriot might hoist a 
strange flag. Not concerned with the ideal as an 
apostolate, he champions it simply because it is true; 
where Newman, for instance, would have been eager to 
arbitrate, Belloc opens fire. The thesis is then estab- 
lished step by step, with a remarkable ability to make 
each point concrete. Nothing drifts into the realm 
of theory, but is tied to time and space, is fastened by 
a vivid and steely empiricism. Facts, the stock in 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HILAIRE BEI^OC 255 

trade of the rationalist, are also the weapons of Bel- 
loc's apologetics. There is never a dearth of satire, 
which is always directed at those who have failed to 
observe how facts cohere and establish principles, but 
great verbal brilliancy, or rather eloquence, is rare. 
The diction has the ring of swords on armor; it is 
never soft and seldom tender. Belloc's work is Napo- 
leonic in the sense that it is done in the belief that an 
army of words must travel on its stomach — on some- 
thing substantial and very evident. Moreover, the 
argument is conducted to win, and there is no pretense 
of concession. Very often it seems dogmatic in the 
extreme ; and it must be admitted that wherever Hilaire 
Belloc loses his sense of humour he is likely to become 
pompously stubborn, like a pre-Revolutionary pam- 
phleteer. 

Since, however, he is generally something of a pam- 
phleteer, it is difficult to examine his work in detail. 
Let us begin with the histories, for the excellent reason 
that Belloc himself began with them. A Frenchman 
born into England would naturally, if his mind con- 
cerned itself with the past, turn to the great epic of 
the Revolution, so significant as a popular and dra- 
matic effort to change the face of the earth. A little 
book on "The French Revolution" will seem to many 
Belloc's most fascinating narrative ; it has the glamour 
of Carlyle, a much better grasp of the situation, and 
the indispensable French logic. Compact though it is, 
this volume manages to cover much ground and is not 
the off-hand essay which its brilliant style might sug- 
gest. Nevertheless, the author's skill is based upon 
a previous diligent study of personalities who domi- 
nated the Revolution and who are still largely mis- 



256 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

understood. "Robespierre" and "Danton" are dra- 
matic biographies, but every chapter is visibly the 
product of scrupulous care. Taken alone they are suf- 
ficient evidence for Belloc's genuine historical ability — 
his exactness and narrative skill — but as life-stories 
they do not equal the later "Marie Antoinette." The 
author is sympathetic with the unfortunate queen but 
does not spare the truth, and the result is a portrait 
that convinces and moves like great fiction. Even Taine, 
whom Belloc resembles by reason of crisp, unemotional 
intelligence, could not have surpassed the psychological 
insight of this book or equaled the splendid art of its 
final chapters. 

Taken altogether, these books present a more accu- 
rate account of the Revolution than is given by any 
other work in English, and their value lies precisely 
in the circumstance that they were written with the 
British public in mind. If there is any part of modern 
history which that public has failed to understand and 
profit by, it is the amazingly democratic uprising of 
the modern French. Characterized by excesses, the 
Revolution nevertheless blocked the progress of cap- 
italism in France just when its power was most tran- 
quilly being established in England. It is hazardous 
to assert that Belloc set forth this history as a pro- 
logue to his attack on the British social system, but 
certainly he could have found no better matter for an 
introduction. Here is the parable; the commentary 
will follow. From the technical point of view these 
books are uneven and betray, despite their general 
vividness and individuality, the hand of one learning 
to write. 

Belloc is not a master of style like his brother-in- 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HILAIRE BEKLOC 257 

arms, the incomparable Chesterton. His writing is 
calmly scintillant, seldom contagiously emotional, and 
his horseplay even is not always mirth. "The Path to 
Rome," however, is a book which challenges attention 
to its craftsmanship. Here is a perfect travel record, 
set down with the shrewd insight, the kindly sympathy, 
and the odd whimsicality of an ideal if unusual voyager. 
The flavour is so rare that one can suggest it only by 
means of an outlandish comparison : it is a blend of the 
modern Samuel Butler and the mediaeval Brother Bozon. 
For the benefit of those who have not traveled to Rome 
with Mr. Belloc, it may be stated that the book claims 
to be an account of a pilgrimage, made on foot and 
without notable deviation from a straight line, from 
Toul on the Meuse to the city of Rome. With the ex- 
ception of the mountainous vistas (curiously the only 
tedious matter in the book) one does not see much of 
the landscape, but rather a great deal of the Catholic 
spirit of this elusive and altogether delightful country- 
side. The traveler arrives in quaint towns, converses 
with simple folk, gathers entrancing legends, drinks 
wine, and goes to Mass. Finally, before one really 
understands what has happened, pilgrim, staff and scrip 
have reached the city of the Popes. 

The author is attempting, of course, to uncover the 
mediaeval walls upon which modern Europe rests. He 
laughs with the Catholic peasant at the expense of the 
modernist; he joins eagerly in the dozen democratic 
things which people who are free in practice think it 
natural to perform. The observations, while not 
paradoxical, are none the less satisfying, and one drifts 
out of industrial society without the least semblance 
of a shock. Meantime the author is going about his 



258 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

business very skillfully and actually does reconstruct 
a social environment that may be called mediaeval. 
"The Path to Rome" is a polemic in disguise, like some 
gentle, ancient allegory, and the disguise is admirable. 
The style has spice and vigour, but above all things 
a kind of ruminative reasonableness which needs a 
reader just the least bit sympathetic. For the truth 
about Belloc is that his arguments are almost never 
adorned with smiles for the enemy, are militaristic. 
This book is also the manifesto of its author's mys- 
ticism, a joyous but rational discernment of the Truth 
in the little things of life. None of his other travel 
sketches, among which "Paris" and "The River of 
London" may be mentioned, seem to reach the level of 
"The Path to Rome," although their eye for the adven- 
ture of history is interesting and fruitful for the mind. 
Hilaire Belloc is a master of travel literature because 
of his instinct for the poetry of places, which lies not 
so much in the scene that makes a picture as in the 
history that makes a song. 

The books mentioned so far may be considered the 
foundations of Belloc's journalistic career which, open- 
ing about the time of the Boer War and amid the 
triumph of imperialism, had for its purpose the restora- 
tion of the idea of liberty. It is impossible, of course, 
to review the whole of this endeavour, so much of which 
was dedicated to a particular hour and to a select 
audience. For instance, the files of the Dublin Review 
contain two of the most striking papers that their 
author has written: one on Bury's "History of the 
Freedom of Thought," and the other on H. G. Wells' 
"Outline of History." For the purposes of the present 
discussion, we shall practically confine the matter to 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HILAIRE BEKLOC £59 

Belloc's most important book on social problems, "The 
Servile State." 

When this volume appeared it made clear to every- 
body that there is a solution of the social injustice 
which cuts across the positions which leading modern 
schools of thought have drawn up. Previously any 
discussion of industrial economics had seemed a strug- 
gle between Capitalism and Socialism, though either of 
these might assume peculiar forms. Belloc, however, 
boldly declared that Capitalism is an imperfect, a 
transitory, social condition, and that the real struggle 
lies between what he called the Servile State, wherein 
'so considerable a number of families and individuals 
are constrained by positive law to labour for the ad- 
vantage of others as to stamp the whole community 
with the mark of such labour,' and the Distributive 
State, wherein the ownership of property is divided 
among the great majority of citizens. The purpose 
of this book, however, is not to make a brief for the 
distributive ownership of property, but rather to show 
that the Servile State is the easiest solution of our 
present difficulties and is, in fact, the one which is 
gradually being adopted. The historical chapters ex- 
plain how paganism was complacently servile and how 
the Christian civilization which superseded it almost 
proved successful in setting up the distributive state. 
Some of these declarations have long been common- 
places in France, but the temper of England is still 
quite foreign to them. 

It was expected that the book would be attacked 
and it was built to offer sturdy resistance. Written 
and arranged with the logic of an able schoolman, its 
case rests stubbornly on facts which are difficult to 



260 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

conjure away. History is the soil upon which Belloc's 
sentences stand like trees, well-groomed and scornful 
of puny blows. They defy criticism of the ordinary 
sort because they do not plead for anything, but simply 
state the situation. While there is never any doubt 
of Belloc's preference for the freedom of the Christian 
State, he realizes very fully that its restoration is 
everywhere dependent upon the regaining of a free 
mind, which is the social aim of the Catholic Spirit 
everywhere. One sees at a glance that this book crys- 
tallizes into a few phrases the basis of the instinctive 
opposition of the Church to Socialism; that Chester- 
ton's championship of "peasant society" is built upon 
it, and that dozens of others have profited by the defi- 
nitions and conclusions it presents. Belloc himself 
undertook in several essays to outline more completely 
the distributive state and to suggest practical meas- 
ures by which it could be promoted. In "The Party 
System" (written in collaboration with Cecil Chester- 
ton) he exposed in a telling way the secret and venal 
political combines by which the British government is 
actually administered. The book does not seem of suf- 
ficient general interest to be called more than a bril- 
liant pamphlet. 

Belloc's social criticism, akin to the Code Napoleon 
in many of its legal principles, suggests his writings 
on military subjects. A year's service with an army 
is not ordinarily a reason why a man should be credited 
with an understanding of strategy, but granting his 
natural gifts and studious preparation for the writing 
of history, it will supply him with a directness of per- 
ception and an understanding of details not easy to 
obtain in other ways. In many essays written before 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN! HILAIRE BELLOC 261 

the war Belloc proved an astute discoverer of clues to 
military mysteries, and in his account of the battle of 
Valmy unearthed what seems to be a satisfactory 
theory to account for the strange outcome of that 
struggle. During the war his analysis of the First 
Battle of the Marne attracted wide attention and seems 
to have been a remarkably correct bit of deductive rea- 
soning. It is quite evident that he enjoys exploring 
battlefields which, the pacifist notwithstanding, are the 
cradles of new eras. 

Underneath all of this, however, there has lain the 
deeper and more permanent earth of Catholic tradi- 
tion. Every page of Belloc's work bears the imprint 
of the Creed, but in what seems his most important 
book after "The Path to Rome" the Church is the 
immediate subject-matter. "Europe and the Faith" 
adopts for its thesis the proposition that the soul of 
European civilization, the inner power which has pur- 
posefully shaped it and given it a f cogent unity, is the 
Catholic Faith, and that a return to this Faith is the 
only possible escape from social ruin. Belloc pro- 
ceeds to show how Europe was originally welded to- 
gether and civilized by Rome ; how the Church preserved 
and transformed the culture of the tottering and sunken 
Empire; and how the unity thus established was dis- 
solved by the Reformation which, originally concerned 
with ecclesiastical abuses, ended, by reason of the 
defection of Britain, in the disruption of Western civ- 
ilization. Most of the elements of this doctrine are 
not original; many have been taught by Saint Augus- 
tine, by Bossuet, by Newman, and various others. But 
they have probably never before been set down so sym- 
metrically and arrestingly in one book. 



262 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Criticism of the historical data of "Europe and the 
Faith" must be left to competent historians. No one 
else is able, for instance, to offer an opinion on the 
validity of Belloc's theory that the Anglo-Saxon lan- 
guage spread over England because the missionaries 
sent from Rome adopted it. The manner in which 
the book is written may, however, be legitimately com- 
mented upon here. In the first place, the tone is char- 
acteristically belligerent. What of it? If history is 
worth troubling about, surely one is permitted to at- 
tack error savagely. If records and common sense 
show plainly that the Church was not despotic, surely 
a little harshness is not out of place with people who 
assert blandly that she was more tyrannical than a 
Cossack chieftain. There is nothing that prejudice 
fears more than to be called prejudice. Next, there is 
no unfairness in the book, excepting perhaps a some- 
what abnormal and unfortunate antipathy to the Ger- 
mans. The evidence for Belloc's theory is stated with- 
out any subterfuge, is put so clearly that one is never 
in doubt of the concrete testimony upon which the case 
rests. There is question of nothing except history; 
the argument is concise, scholarly, and manly. If 
mistakes have been made they are obviously not inten- 
tional. One may state without hesitation that "Europe 
and the Faith" is not only a challenge, but also an 
honourable and respectable challenge, worthy of at- 
tention. 

The book is important enough to make an examina- 
tion of the style interesting. Throughout the lan- 
guage is simple and direct, the language of a man 
earnestly addressing a thoughtful audience. No word 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN: HILAIRE BELLOC 263 

has been set down for the mere sake of literary effect, 
and if there are metaphors it is because the argument 
requires them. The most interesting trait of style is, 
however, the manner in which the distant past is made 
real by simple pictures of the daily life of the time. 
As the exposition proceeds, propositions to which we 
have perfunctorily assented, as one does to abstractions 
of comparative aloofness, become as plainly sensible 
as if they were incarnate in our own day. Belloc must 
have learned not a little psychology from Newman. 
Never before has the formation of Christendom been 
so succinctly and realistically set forth or made to 
seem so genuinely the Divine Adventure. "Europe 
and the Faith" is unique and necessary because of the 
clarity, the logical power, of a very great historian. 
Into a few staunch chapters he appears to have com- 
pressed all that an honest observer can say about the 
continuity of Christendom. 

It is somewhat remarkable that so diligent a student 
should have what may be termed the finer gifts of 
poetry. Nevertheless, in "Verses" Belloc has collected 
stanzas that admit of comparison with the finest of 
modern English lyrics. They are, as might have been 
expected, distinctly French, resembling Beranger much 
more closely than Tennyson, and masculine in form 
and verve. Belloc is not a conscious, brooding artist 
begetting inspiration from the sweat of his brow, but 
rather a jovial singer whose tunes come to his lips quite 
naturally. As a general rule, the note is satirical, 
with a stanza or two of sheer wisdom, whimsical, ten- 
der, and yet not romantic. Perhaps, however, such 
poetry will be admired rather than loved. 



264 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

"The South Country" sings the praise of Sussex with 
a haunting refrain through which peers the melancholy 
of life: 

"A lost thing could I never find, 

Nor a broken thing mend: 
And I fear I shall be all alone 

When I get towards the end. 
Who will be there to comfort me 

Or who will be my friend?" 

This looks far off from the downs of England into 
the lonely stretches of human mystery, a gaze that is 
the secret of Belloc's grip on the heart in such other 
poems as "The Prophet Lost in the Hills at Evening," 
"Courtesy," and "The Rebel." There is excellent 
satire in "Dives" and keen burlesque in "Newdigate 
Poem," which is attributed to Mr. Lambkin of Burford, 
who has chosen for his subject, "The Benefits of Elec- 
tric Light." The attack, however, is never local or 
personal but directed always at the vagaries of modern 
thought. Even Belloc's poetry is belligerent, but then 
soldiers have been known to make verses. It is an 
interesting fact that his favorite form is a compromise 
between the lyric and the ballad, a form admirably 
befitting a man of action in whose nature there is a 
saving touch of reflection, of human sadness, of kin- 
ship with the earth and its beauty. There can be no 
doubt that Belloc is a good poet, although one is not 
ready to believe that his verses deserve the extravagant 
praise that some of his friends have buried them under. 
If Belloc the poet merits attention, Belloc the novel- 
ist and essayist is probably more interesting. The 
word "novelist" must be used reservedly here, for his 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN! HILAIRE BEKLOC 265 

books are not great social outlines of life but rather 
satiric allegories that have to do with politics. "Em- 
manuel Burden" is diverting and incisive symbolism, 
between the contours of which lie buried a host of first- 
rate leading articles for a somewhat revolutionary 
newspaper. Englishmen in general do not seem to have 
taken to it kindly, and Americans are too remote from 
the scene to be deeply interested. Belloc the essayist, 
on the other hand, is a universal figure. A man who 
has written "On Everything" and "On Nothing" may 
reasonably be expected to be dull occasionally, but the 
average Bellocian essay is a stimulant. Many of the 
papers gathered in "First and Last" and "Hills and 
the Sea" are shrewd comments on historical writing, 
quaint travel sketches, or interpretations of human 
nature made in a fresh and unusually thoughtful mood. 
The essay is a prose lyric that is saved by its flavor of 
didacticism from the excessive influence of romantic 
imagination, and it seems, in fact, the avenue that leads 
to classic art. No literary form could be better suited 
to the natural gifts of Hilaire Belloc, and this he has 
not failed to discover. 

In speaking finally of the great service which he 
has rendered to Christendom in these days of its partial 
revival in England, one may say that Belloc has found 
that service difficult but not discouraging. By nature 
a good fighter, he has not feared to battle against odds. 
Freedom, the distributive state, and the Catholic con- 
science of history are Christian ideas, but they are 
acceptable to few even among Catholics. To assert 
them dogmatically, to make practical issues of them, 
and to accompany their defense with barbed arrows of 
satire, is to invite hostility and to limit one's audience. 



266 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It is characteristic to Belloc that he has not thought 
of these consequences. Resolutely conscious of a mis- 
sion to assert principles, he has left to others the task 
of popularizing and discussing them. Fortunately, 
Chesterton, the man best fitted to undertake such a 
task, has performed it with a success that need not 
be dwelt on here. The two men have leaned on each 
other and have drawn proud strength from their alli- 
ance. The truth of the Chestertonian maxim, "Two 
times one are not two, but two thousand times one" has 
never been more fully proved. 

Belloc is a man of no illusions, and one might almost 
say of no dreams. There is no Utopia in his philoso- 
phy, although he would agree with Ruskin that the 
saddest thing which can happen to people who see how 
bad matters are is to believe them incapable of better- 
ment. Only, he insists that only one system of life, 
only one principle of action, can effect a permanent 
betterment because in fact only one has done so. The 
logical French mind that has fed on Bossuet, Pascal, 
and Taine will not be weaned from the experience of 
history. And it is characteristic of that French mind 
again that it should, for all its common sense, love 
both truth and laughter. The mirth of Belloc is not 
the humour which is the meat of English literature, but 
rather the wit that is the kindly wine of France's 
thought. Two men more different in philosophy than 
Stendhal and Belloc cannot be imagined, unless one 
takes into account their mutual admiration for Napo- 
leonic methods. And yet in instinct and manner they 
are strikingly alike. Stendhal's analysis of love is no 
more empirical or incisive than Belloc's dissection of 
modern politics, and the verve of phrase is similar in 



ADVENTURES OF AN HISTORIAN! HILAIRE BELLOC 267 

both authors. If Newman is like Ernest Renan, is it 
out of place to say that Belloc resembles the elusive 
Henry Beyle? Many, of course, will prefer to find a 
counterpart in Joseph de Maistre. 

Belloc has aroused Catholics to a better understand- 
ing of their ancestry and their duty. Not everything 
he champions will be accepted, and not everything 
ought to be accepted. Nevertheless, he has done more 
than any other living Englishman to uphold steadfastly 
the social principles of Christendom and to restore 
these to a position of public importance. Philosophies 
to which Catholic opposition was instinctive but 
scarcely well organized have now become unmasked and 
human adversaries. The renaissance of Catholic social 
action in English-speaking countries has accepted his 
distinctions and his phrases. It has been an honest 
career, noble in its inspiration, selfless in its motive, 
and human in its preoccupations. 

BOOK NOTE 

Several of Hilaire Belloc's most interesting volumes are tem- 
porarily out of print. Many of his finest essays must be sought 
out in the files of the Dublin Review, Studies, The New Witness, 
and The Catholic World. See "Chesterbelloc," by Theodore May- 
nard (Catholic World, 1919); J. Kilmer's introduction to "Verses"; 
"Socialism and the Great State," by H. G. Wells; and several 
articles in The Living Age. It is useful to compare Belloc's his- 
torical position with that assumed by various French authors: 
Bossuet in the "Discourse on Universal History," Louis Bertrand 
in "Saint Augustin," and P. Imbart de la Tour in "Histoire. 
Politique." Of interest as bases for comparison are Stendhal's 
"Napoleon" and J. de Maistre's "Soirees." The student of history 
proper will, of course, see the influence of Guizot, Fustel de 
Coulanges, and Charles Maurras. 



CHAPTER FIFTEEN 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 



"It is when night prevails that it is fine to believe in the light." 

Rostand's "Chanticleer." 

THE appearance of Ireland as a distinct creative 
force in English letters is the outstanding lit- 
erary fact of the post-Victorian age. It is 
like the sudden, stalwart entry of a giant into a room 
where none of the company has imagined his existence 
or been prepared to welcome his society. There is a 
bit of boldness about it and some resultant dismay. 
Our admiration is tinged with bewilderment; we suc- 
cumb to the stranger without feeling quite at home in 
his presence. And yet, what a glorious stranger he is ! 
"The Celt," says Mr. Shane Leslie, "struck the an- 
cients as the only folk who would lend money on a 
note due in the next world." This perplexing con- 
creteness of religious belief remains, indeed, with the 
Irish, but they strike us primarily as a people without 
money to lend, a people whose voice has, after all, been 
spared by misery and martyrdom from the trade of the 
auctioneer. Liberty and fairies are still real things in 
Ireland, and it is more than a coincidence that a civil- 
ization believing in force will have nothing to do with 
any of them. The insanity of the armies that hounded 
the peasant patriot to his hovel is a tragic mystery 

268 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 269 

for all who love the virtues and traditions of the Eng- 
lish people ; but it is no more tragic or mysterious than 
the gradual disappearance from Britain of familiarity 
with the elemental things which to the Irishman are 
like next-door neighbours. 

Whatever the future may hold in store, the past has 
spanned a gulf between the two races. The Britisher 
fails largely to understand the Celt and Celtic liter- 
ature because he no longer quite understands himself. 
He has forgotten about England, his modern books are 
mostly of the Empire; but all of Irish literature is 
about an island. The two are separated by the differ- 
ence between a man who has lost himself in his conquests 
and a man who has never been conquered; between the 
hard and greedy sea and the land which it has sur- 
rounded but is powerless to engulf. We rediscover in 
Irish letters as they exist today a surprising, long-lost 
freshness, tenderness, spirituality ; and so we naturally 
find them unfamiliar. An attempt at appraisal must 
deal with mysteries and beauties alike, and it has every 
reason to be modest. 

The voice of Ireland in English literature is, to begin 
with, an anomaly, a heaping-up of coals of fire upon 
the oppressor's head. This music and message ante- 
date the Saxon and are largely foreign to his nature. 
That Gaelic is beyond a doubt the natural language 
of Irishmen becomes more evident as its revival pro- 
gresses. English rhythm, idiom, and metaphor are 
alien to this people, and the sources of their fancy and 
meditation are in no way Anglo-Saxon. The develop- 
ment of Irish expression in English has been contempo- 
raneous with the restoration of the ancient tongue; 
and it is likely that if Gaelic were rooted out by law 



270 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

or accident, the greater portion of the individuality 
which makes the writing of Ireland priceless would 
disappear. There is a mysterious law which decrees 
that a people's soul and its language are inseparable. 
Still, we need not believe that Gaelic will ever prevail 
to the exclusion of English ; Anglo-Irish literature will 
(let us hope) continue to develop, drawing inspiration 
and originality from the ancient tongue. If not, the 
future voice of Ireland will be as foreign to Englishmen 
as Russian. 

Another matter that distinguishes the Celtic utter- 
ance is strong national feeling, an instinctively emo- 
tional protest against bondage. The older Irish 
authors in English literature frankly adopted the Brit- 
ish point of view, even if they did retain their natural 
gifts. Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, 
and Oliver Goldsmith had the genius of their exotic 
ancestry but they were not exiles. They looked upon 
the world from the windows of London as from a home. 
During the nineteenth century, however, the Irishman 
rediscovered his tradition: the legends and history, 
which the peasant had tenaciously preserved, appeared 
publicly in Dublin and took possession of art. The 
picture of Ireland as a nation, as the Black Rose or 
the radiantly beautiful Kathleen, seemed drawn every- 
where on the high walls of the sea. This vision begat 
a literature that cannot be separated from patriotism 
in the healthy sense, and is accordingly baffling for even 
the sympathetic alien. "This 'terrible and splendid 
trust,' " says Thomas MacDonagh, "this 'heritage of 
the race of kings,' this service of a nation without a 
flag, but 'with the lure of God in her eyes' has endowed 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 271 

some of our poetry with meanings that must be lost to 
all but those baptized in our national faith." 

None the less, there is a difference between national 
feeling and nationalism, between writing that is in- 
spired by indigenous tradition and that dictated by the 
political policy of the moment. Some of the most 
highly gifted men in Ireland have failed in art because 
their duty, as they saw it, was to make propaganda. 
The misery of the fatherland, the sting of the invaders' 
lash, memories of famine and destitution, goaded them 
to frenzy but scarcely to fine frenzy. This almost 
eighteenth-century concern with abstract ideals, a noble 
concern but fatal to letters, helps to make the Irish 
renaissance difficult to set forth. The battle is still 
too noisy for the tranquil enjoyment of song. Yeats 
is a great poet but a weak patriot ; MacDonagh was a 
glorious soldier but scarcely a master-poet. The Irish 
will probably enshrine this soldier and forget this 
singer; and no appreciation of literature is honest 
unless it takes into account the attitude of the people 
directly concerned. 

Since we shall limit ourselves here to the literature 
of the Catholic Spirit, we must confront another great 
difficulty. What is the nature of that Spirit in Ire- 
land? It is not very essential that there are so and 
so many Catholics in the island or that the parish 
priest is a popular figure: the important thing is to 
learn how far the Celtic mood has been influenced by 
the traditions of Christendom, and what it has con- 
tributed to the establishment and interpretation of 
these. Everyone knows how gloriously and at what 
cost the Irish have held aloft the light of the Faith. In 



272 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the centuries immediately following the arrival of Saint 
Patrick, scholars and poets from Celtic monasteries 
carried the gifts of Christian civilization over the 
northern parts of Europe; great names succeeded one 
another like emeralds on a gleaming chain — Alcuin, 
Columbanus, Dun Scotus. Nevertheless, circumstances 
conspired to leave Ireland comparatively unaffected by 
the later triumphant efflorescence of Christendom. She 
stood of necessity aloof from Rome and romance. The 
native mythology was probably never fully merged in 
the symbolism of the Church; art did not rear many 
magnificent Gothic monuments on the island of saints. 
Moreover, an even wider separation from the culture 
of Europe was the result of the modern persecutions 
under which peasant and priest adhered with miracu- 
lous tenacity to the Faith which they could not make 
social, which was shadowed by the repressive influence 
of the Puritan invaders. It must be admitted also 
that the rulers of the Church did not always under- 
stand the Irish situation, and from Pope Adrian to 
Cardinal Cullen there were found ecclesiastics to suc- 
cumb to English influence. 

None of these things can, however, minimize the 
essential fact that the Catholic Spirit in Ireland has 
meant as much as even the national impulse. The Celt 
had beautiful gods when Saint Patrick came and he 
was converted without the shedding of blood. Since 
that time, numberless generations have gone the thorny 
path of faith with full confidence in the sanctity of their 
martyrdom. Christianity has become so domesticated 
that it is part of the daily speech, of the "furniture" 
of life. That the Irish are primarily a nation of peas- 
ants, that they lack the artistic sensibility of the mod- 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 273 

ern aesthete and cherish poetic stories about the pagan 
gods, surely does not diminish the power of the spirit 
of belief within them. If they have not built edifices 
like those which are the testament of mediaeval France, 
or if Dublin is not a city of colour and form and mani- 
fold music like Bruges, it is surely retort enough to say 
that no people has ever created a satisfactory social 
life while burdened by oppression. The Irish creed 
will wear beautiful garments when it is given liberty 
to make them. Our cursory examination of the utter- 
ance of the Catholic Spirit in Ireland will show that it 
is nothing slight or mean, but instead a crown which is 
the more beautiful and symbolic because it is, in many 
ways, a crown of thorns. 

Thus with a background that is Gaelic, national, 
partisan, and uniquely Catholic, the Irish literary 
movement has attained the proportions of a renaissance 
which impresses the reader by its young robustness, 
which seems to have linked hands with the morning of 
the world. It has delved into numerous strange things : 
the poetry of the Celtic gods, ancient hero-lore, and 
mysticism of several kinds. The relation existing be- 
tween this revival and the English tradition was, how- 
ever, made possible by a group of writers whose inspira- 
tion was more conventional but who were sufficiently 
in the current to merit being called precursors. 

One of the most famous of these is the story teller 
William Carleton, whose slightly pessimistic genius 
made the common life of his people a matter of literary 
interest. Although he is known chiefly for many 
spirited tales, there also stands to his credit a novel 
of unusual power, "Fardorougha the Miser." Somber, 
rather Gothic in mood, it is scarcely representative 



274 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Irish fiction. Of the two Banims, John and Michael, 
little is remembered today excepting the intriguing 
"Tales of the O'Hara Family." Here, as in Carle- 
ton's stories, the sense of form is lamentably unde- 
veloped, nor is there any outstanding concern with 
actual life in Ireland. 

The most representative early novelist, both as an 
Irishman and a Catholic, was beyond a doubt Gerald 
Griffin. He was typically strong in moral character; 
having come to London in search of literary fame, he 
lived down extraordinary hardships and temptations 
without damage to his spirit, although his body broke 
under the strain. Griffin was strong and serene, a 
soldier of the soul, even to his modest death as a Chris- 
tian Brother. These qualities are finely reflected in 
his only enduring work, "The Collegians," where there 
are imagination, delicate humour, and loyalty to the 
ideal. The form is sufficiently good to hold the story 
over to new generations. Griffin's success was the suc- 
cess of character, a matter which the Irish demand in 
poet and patriot. They value in their leaders what a 
primeval people would consider worth while in selecting 
a king: moral grandeur and a temperament not too 
mystical to lack the iron upon which the success of 
causes is wrought. 

With Thomas Moore the poetry of modern Ireland 
begins. And what poetry it is ! Hundreds of songs 
and ballads, the authors of which are unknown or for- 
gotten, bear the unmistakable stamp of Celtic sadness 
or laughter, belief in or acceptance of life. No people 
has ever set its imagination so readily to music ; and the 
greatly gifted men and women among them have taken 
care that the melody should be rich and radiant. 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 275 

Moore, vagabond of many lands and moods, was gen- 
erally superficial and not very faithful to his own 
country. Nevertheless, his Irish melodies, caught up 
here and there and set down in faultless English which 
manages not to rob them of spontaneous pathos and 
fancy, are great in spite of the poet's subsequent 
"Lalla Rookh" and "Epicure." Earliest of Ireland's 
poets, Moore was also her first aesthete and uncovered 
a tendency in the Celtic character which modern times 
have seen develop. 

If Tom Moore gave to the genuine Irishman a kind 
of staginess, in the "Reliques of Father Prout," the 
stage Irishman very nearly became real; his was the 
poetry of the sprightly ballad, the jovial jest, and the 
whimsical reminiscence. It is indicative of this poet's 
personal character that he should have been a Jesuit 
who neglected his calling and a native of Cork who died 
in Paris. "The Bells of Shandon" has become folk- 
lore, and other verses of the same sort are known 
around the world. The mirth of Father Prout is off- 
set by the sad, sensitive spirit of Jeremiah Joseph Cal- 
lanan, who died young but not before he had discovered 
the enchantment of the Gaelic saga. In general the 
poetry of the early Irish writers was a series of experi- 
ments that sought to adjust Celtic notes to the English 
scale. It was a generous struggle, for the victory 
came of necessity to their inheritors. 

Side by side with this fashioning of story and verse 
the immemorial struggle for the country was revived, 
and stirring spokesmen pleaded for the treasured cause. 
Of eloquence and the literary graces which accompany 
it the Irishman has never stood in need. Verve and 
beauty of address are his by right of birth, and half 



276 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the great modern English orators are Celts. Among 
them all there is none who sums up so majestically the 
virtues and faults of his race as Daniel O'Connell. He 
is the only modern conqueror of Ireland, and he sub- 
dued her with the loving power of his voice, in which 
there was tenderness and fear, wit and quiet faith, the 
noblest kind of patriotism, and yet a blindness to the 
real position of his country. England beat him to the 
ground in the end, but Samson-like he shook the walls 
of her palace in his collapse. Had the rulers of Britain 
known the future, could they have foreseen the surge 
of outraged sentiment rising from one end of the Gaelic 
land to the other, they would have listened to O'Connell. 
His life was a splendid performance, with the action, 
sparkle, and pathos of a brilliant play. But the mod- 
ern Irishman has grown too desperately in earnest for 
the theater and the curtain has gone down on the glory 
of the greatest among Celtic orators. 

With the foundation of the Nation by Charles Gavan 
Duffy, in 1842, Irish leaders began to abandon the idea 
of conciliation with England and to dream of inde- 
pendence. This paper, glowing with enthusiasm for a 
country "beautiful and sacred," whose history and 
cause seemed as radiantly attractive as the shores of 
a rich and undiscovered country, reached everyone from 
judge to mechanic and gained their hearts. Duffy was 
himself a poet and the idea of publishing national songs 
and ballads met with enthusiastic response. It was not 
poetry in the strict sense, but rather verse of passion 
and sentiment written by able men and women after 
the day's work had been done. Chief among the writers 
of this fervent national hymnody was Thomas Davis, 
a man who seems to have embodied all the virtues of 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 277 

ideal Irish manhood. As a result he stood, during his 
short life, as close to the hearts of his people as any 
man of the time. Davis was first of all a patriot, and 
his verse lacks the meditativeness of the poet whose 
only mission is song. One loves him for the stirring 
ballads of battle, like "Fontenoy" or "The Sack of 
Baltimore," in which the martial rhythm is quickened 
by burning emotion and the rhetoric is abundantly re- 
deemed by splendid earnestness. In a few other poems, 
notably the "Lament for Owen Roe" the inspiration of 
Gaelic originals is more sensible, and these are con- 
sidered, therefore, superior by many. In general, 
Davis' poetry is the revelation of his own spirit rather 
than the record of a contemplative brooding over life 
as a whole; its energetic manliness compensates for a 
manifest unripeness of handling. His influence is 
visible in the work of other Nation poets such as John 
O'Hagan, author of the stirring song, "Ourselves 
Alone," and Ellen Downing, whose religious and patri- 
otic verse has the naturalness and simplicity of bird- 
song. 

In James Clarence Mangan Irish poetry beheld its 
first authentic genius. Viewing life with an artist's 
detachment he found the key to ancient Gaelic hymns, 
to rhythms of exotic loveliness, and to the heart of the 
modern world. Like Thompson he followed Coleridge 
and was in tuivn beloved of Poe. Thus, more than 
any other poet, he synthesizes the Irish and English 
traditions. Personally Mangan was a failure, a poor 
and melancholy man, whose dreams were often clouded 
by opium and drink ; but there was nothing base in his 
soul. He was, says Miss Guiney, "a solitary young 
golden-haired figure, rapt and kind" and "his speech 



278 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was full of sudden witticisms, shy fooling that drew no 
blood." Forced to his daily labor as a clerk, this poet 
went arrayed in outlandish clothes that included a small 
brown cloak and an absurdly large hat. However, the 
umbrella which he carried constantly, to the great 
amusement of his companions, was the symbol of the 
sword he might have borne in an ancient epic contest 
with the brood of evil. As it was, he made war only 
upon himself. 

Mangan's great poems gleam with the splendour of 
the past, but it is always a sad or embattled splendour, 
with scarcely a touch of the gayety with which the Irish 
have so often gone to death. His best work was done 
in adaptations from the Gaelic where the old songs lay 
ready to his hand ; alone as he was, little moved him to 
original work. Yet, though such a poem as "Dark 
Rosaleen" is almost as old as the Celtic race, the weird 
beauty of Mangan's English version is the creation of 
his own genius. What marvelous conformity of emo- 
tion with the rhythm of words I The poem opens, plain- 
tive and consoling, deepens its note of tragedy, and 
stifles pain in tears and vows of devotion; then finally 
becomes insurgent, facing the pitiless foe with a des- 
perate battle-cry: 

"Oh ! the Erne shall run red, 

With redundance of blood, 
The earth shall rock beneath our tread, 

And flames wrap hill and wood, 
And gun-peal and slogan-cry 

Wake many a glen serene, 
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, 

My dark Rosaleen!" 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 279 

Who does not know these lines that burst with passion, 
that are musical but scorn the bonds of traditional 
verse? It is the master-song, thus far, of Ireland. 
Nevertheless, Mangan's adaptation of "O'Hussey's Ode 
to the Maguire" is alive with the same reckless emotion 
and has some of the most haunting lines in English : 

"Though he were even a wolf raging the round green 
woods, 
Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchain- 

able sea, 
Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce 
bear, he, 
This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods. " 

And yet the poet who triumphed thus over the limita- 
tions of his art was also the scribbler of second-rate 
stanzas galore, the victim of rhetorical eloquence and 
willful rhyming, the counterpart of Father Prout. 
Mangan's career is, in fact, the index to the artistic 
development of Catholic Ireland in his time. That 
Ireland was at once enthusiastic and uncritical ; unable 
to follow the poet when he was a seer, it acclaimed him 
boisterously when he was a clown. But it is probable 
that nothing could have saved Mangan; in the end he 
lost control both of himself and his craft, carrying to a 
dark tomb the darkness of his dreams, a pathetic king 
of a land of shadows. The poets nearest to him in 
sentiment are two who belong to the English tradition 
— Lionel Johnson and Aubrey de Vere. 

Modern religious poetry in Ireland may be said to 
have begun with Katherine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson). 
The daughter of a robust, intelligent country gentle- 



280 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

man, she lived and studied in modest retirement until 
the appearance of her first volume, "Louise de la Val- 
liere," which, as the title suggests, followed pre- 
Raphaelite conventions and was enthusiastically re- 
ceived by Ruskin, the Rossettis, and a large share of 
the general public. Since then new books have been 
issued frequently, for this poet is almost fatally facile. 
Two among them are especially noteworthy — "Sham- 
rocks" and "The Wind in the Trees." Devotedly Irish 
in spite of more sympathy with the English tradition 
than most young Irelanders display, Katherine Tynan 
is a patriotic poet interested in the Gaelic past. Nev- 
ertheless, her distinctive quality is a devotional natu- 
ralism, a blending of delight in the beauty of the earth 
with loving, joyous worship of God. No matter how 
intimate her knowledge of the world may have become, 
she is firmly Franciscan in spirit. In "The Flowers of 
Peace" she gathered the best of her devotional poems 
as a magician might gather sunshine that flits through 
the windows of a country chapel. Hers is, indeed, a 
sunlit Irish faith, confident, sad, with none of the 
bitterness of disillusionment. To such gentle lyrics 
as "St. Francis to the Birds," "Cor Dulce," and "Sheep 
and Lambs," the world will turn almost as gladly as 
to the "Fioretti." Where the same note is in disguise, 
as in "An Island Fisherman" and "Larks," it is no less 
effective. Naturally one may object to many of 
Katherine Tynan's lyrics on the ground that they are 
scarcely more than fluent stanzas done in a hurry, but 
the best of her work is the very voice of the Catholic 
soul of Ireland. 

Quite like this poet in sentiment and manner was 
Rose Kavanagh, a girl poet who died before her genius 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 281 

had been formed. The little book she left is singular 
in promise and melody, and makes her name a poignant 
recollection. Sadness of a different kind is evoked by 
the name of Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter) 
who died heartbroken after the Eastern Uprising in 
1916. She is the poet of neither convention nor laugh- 
ter, but instead a brooding spirit weary of the bonds 
of modern life and impassionedly responsive to the 
primitive call of the Gael. The ballad proved the most 
successful medium for the expression of her emotions ; 
the ballad fashioned on a Celtic bias, unfamiliar there- 
fore to English ears, but often reminiscent of Con- 
tinental masterpieces like Goethe's "Erlkonig" or the 
truest stanzas of Grillparzer. This affinity with a 
certain type of Teutonic poetry is, surely, very evident 
in Mrs. Snorter's work and is the more remarkable 
because she was so completely, sensitively Irish. No 
woman has ever felt more deeply the tragedy of her 
race or borne it with greater fortitude. Such ballads 
as "Cean Duv Deelish," "All Souls' Night," and "The 
Woman Who Went to Hell" are perfect in form al- 
though, unfortunately, the greater portion of Mrs. 
Shorter's work is marred by inadvertencies of tech- 
nique. She who cared so much more for the spirit of 
life than for its conventions, adopted the same point of 
view in art. 

Two other Irish women to write poetry were Moira 
O'Neill, author of "Songs of the Glens of Antrim," 
and Ethna Carberry, who is remembered for "The 
Four Winds of Eirnn." Neither volume has the verve 
of great poetry or the fresh devotion of Katherine 
Tynan's best lyrics, but both taste of the country and 
are the forerunners of that robust peasant song with 



282 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which the name of Padraic Colum is now so closely 
identified. Colum, a playwright and the author of 
"Wild Earth and Other Poems," represents the Irish 
farmer as a stark primordial man with his hands on 
the plough. Whereas Dora Sigerson approached the 
Germans, Colum is almost a brother to the Russians; 
there is in his poetry very little direct religion and 
almost no sense of inherited tradition, but one feels 
the surge of elemental faith, the strength of soul which 
the Irish peasant really possesses. His verse is rugged, 
almost uncouth, though its powerful imagery scorns 
the insinuation of crudity. Very different is another 
poet of the country who died a British soldier in Flan- 
ders. Francis Ledwidge, a boy whose sense of the 
beauty of nature is akin to that of the "Shropshire 
Lad," made simple songs that are both wild and sweet, 
vagabondish in spirit and form. "Songs of Peace" 
probably contains his best work. Ledwidge remained, 
however, somewhat aloof from the official central pur- 
pose of modern Irish literature, the Gaelic revival so 
strongly emphasized by men of letters like George 
Sigerson and Douglas Hyde. 

While the true leadership in Celtic poetry passed 
into the hands of William Butler Yeats, a pure poet 
who viewed all the traditions of his country as literary 
materials and employed his own mysticism, the patri- 
otic fervour of his companions, and the ritual «of the 
Church to fashion lyrics, other men reverted more 
closely to the idea of Davis and placed. action before 
words. Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, and 
Joseph Plunkett, shot by order of the British after the 
Easter Week uprisings bore with mystic, elemental 
fervour the sword of Ireland's freedom and the shield 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 283 

of her faith. Together they seem three tragic Horatii 
going down together. 

Joseph Plunkett was a young man of distinction and 
promise rather than a finished poet, but his book, 
"The Circle and the Sword" seems to foreshadow the 
approach of Celtic poetry to the inner Catholic world 
where Francis Thompson lived. Plunkett himself was, 
enthusiastically, Thompson's disciple in deliberate 
shunning of the commonplace, in spiritual exaltation, 
and in sense of form. His sonnets speak confidently 
of immortality and seem themselves immortal. This 
boy is no trivial rhymster, but the master of space and 
time, another poet for the elect : 

"You must walk the mountain tops where rode 
Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, when the stars 
Fell from their places, and where Satan strode 
To make his leap. Now bend the crackling spars 
Athwart the mast of the world — and five deep scars 
From that strong Cross call you to their abode." 

MacDonagh was a learned, gifted man with a taste 
for study, but he felt that "it is well that here still 
that cause which is identified without underthought of 
commerce, with the cause of God and Right and Free- 
dom, the Cause which has been the great theme of our 
poetry, may any day call the poets to give their lives 
in the service." It is enough, perhaps, to say of Mac- 
Donagh that he was a poet and that he gave his life. 
"Songs of Myself" and "Lyrical Poems," his two fin- 
ished books, are respectable, if not very great. 

It is for Padraic Pearse, of the three, that one natu- 
rally reserves the highest homage. He was first of all 
an educator who dealt lovingly with little children and 



284 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

then took up as an apparently natural consequence 
the spiritual leadership of his folk. Pearse's stories, 
poems, plays — diverse in character and done originally 
in Gaelic — have almost the gentle sublimity of Plato; 
he was a man with a halo in a group of unusual men. 
Irishmen he idealizes as no one else has dared to, ideal- 
izes, though, because he is fundamentally a child "trail- 
ing clouds of glory." Accordingly most people will 
find him in the work he did for children — "Iosogan," 
"The Roads," and "Eineen of the Birds." A deep 
admirer has said: "He is a man with the heart of a 
child. He sees with the eyes of a child and speaks with 
its lips. His stories are not children's stories, they 
are stories of children and so they are read with delight 
by children of all ages. Old Matthew's words to Ioso- 
gan, 'among the children it was that I found you' might 
well be applied to Mr. Pearse himself." But this 
"child" had also the heart of a man whose martyrdom 
was previsioned and sternly met, whose high dreams 
were kingly in a way only kings can understand. 

Tom Kettle died for Ireland in a different fashion 
than the three men just mentioned; he died leading a 
charge in Flanders, with the uniform of a British officer 
on his body. He is placed here among the poets be- 
cause he was able to glorify his death in the lines : 

"Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, 
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, 
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed, 
And for the secret Scripture of the poor," 

But in reality this man, who felt that his nation must 
bleed not only for its own freedom but for the liberty 
of peoples everywhere, was almost, if possible, more 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 285 

than a poet. Only one little book, "The Day's Bur- 
den," remains to tell us of Tom Kettle's sanity and 
remarkable sensitiveness, of his honour and wisdom, 
but its words are unforgettable. He recalls Sir 
Thomas More in ever so many ways. Is it too much 
to say that the attainment of Ireland's independence 
is not nearly so important as the fact that Tom Kettle 
lived for it? 

We shall conclude this cursory examination of Irish 
verse with a mention of only one book among several 
recent ones. In "Arrows," by George Noble Plunkett, 
there is present once more a high, reverent mysticism 
and an unusual spiritual serenity ; the author does not 
lack either a noble sense of form or a ready devotion 
to ideals. There are other poets, but enough has been 
written to indicate the richness and variety of a body 
of verse which has appeared in a surprisingly short 
while. Its many-sidedness is especially noteworthy ; 
there has been no single manner, although lyric and 
ballad measures predominate, and no monotony of 
mood. The peasant has spoken, the soldier has an- 
swered, the voice of girl and mother has been heard. 
Here our purpose has been to set forth those who have 
spoken for the Catholic body ; but we have beheld Irish- 
men always, glowing with enthusiasm for the national 
idea, gathering round the fount of Celtic tradition. So 
distinctly individual is this poetry that fondness for it 
will depend considerably upon one's ability to sym- 
pathize with the aspirations of the Irish people. For 
us their heroes, their gods, their visions are strange 
and often fantastic, but an honest effort to understand 
must fulfill Yeats' prophecy that Anglo-Irish verse 
"will lead many that are sick with theories and with 



286 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

trivial emotion to some sweet well-waters of primeval 
poetry." 

If the modern verse-writers have thus successfully 
carried out the work of their predecessors, the story- 
tellers have not fallen behind them in diligence. Irish 
novels, on the whole, are not stormy. The contrasts, 
the stirring drama, of Irish life have never been ade- 
quately set forth, because these things seemed too com- 
mon-place and men craved idyllic fiction. The success 
of Canon Sheehan's "My New Curate" was due to the 
simple charm of the people it talked about. The parish 
priest is a character to reckon with in Ireland, and his 
exploits and quandaries have helped to make Canon 
Sheehan's book thoroughly delightful. "My New 
Curate" was followed by others, especially "Glenaraar," 
"Lisheen," and "Luke Delmege." These manifest an 
ambitious habit to which their author unfortunately 
became addicted — the study of queer characters in cul- 
tivated society. It was a milieu of which he knew 
almost nothing, whereas his gift for making realistic 
sketches of village life was genuine. The man himself 
was genial, scholarly, and in every way a priest whose 
life was perhaps as much of an inspiration as his books. 

The art of Seumas MacManus is concerned with the 
kindly, humorous aspects of daily life, the lore and 
ready fancy that colour the speech of the Irish peas- 
antry. His early work was exaggerated humour that 
naturally failed to adopt the serious-minded, realistic 
point of view so much lauded by intellectual critics. 
"A Lad of the O'Friels," on the other hand, is a novel 
that is the result of deep brooding and exceptional 
interpretative sympathy. Knocknogar awakes to life 
and hides nothing of its soul from the keen if affection- 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 287 

ate observer. The greater portion of MacManus' work 
consists, however, of short stories, two collections of 
which are especially deserving of attention — "Yourself 
and the Neighbours" and "Top O' the Morning." Here 
and throughout his writings the author is an intense 
patriot who loves the traditions and inhabitants of his 
country so well that he may be inclined to neglect the 
shadows. While his treatment is much like that of 
Jane Barlow, he is intimate where she stands aloof. 
Ethna Carberry (Mrs. MacManus) wrote stories which 
are preferred by many to those of her husband. 

Three women whose novels are attempts to amalga- 
mate the Catholic idea in Ireland with the national 
principle are M. E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell), 
Katherine Tynan, and Rosa Mulholland. All have 
done good work, although none is even approximately 
a great novelist. "Dark Rosaleen" is probably Mrs. 
BlundelPs most impressive performance. Two boys 
who grow up side by side are made to represent, re- 
spectively, the tendencies of the North and South of 
Ireland. The women, really impressive epic figures, 
symbolize the suffering and the immortal hope of their 
country. It is with regret that one is forced to admit 
the technical gaucherie of "Dark Rosaleen": a very 
poignant story has been turned very nearly into melo- 
drama. Miss Mulholland has grace and sprightliness, 
but an obviously sentimental mind. Katherine Tynan's 
fiction is readable, sprightly, and superficial. 

Unquestionably the outstanding Catholic master of 
contemporary Irish narrative is Daniel Corkery, who 
sums up also the spiritual results of the Rebellion. 
Corkery is a story-teller, as has been said ; he is also a 
poet and an effective playwright. To perceive the 



288 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

range and quality of this man's genius one may select 
from his rather ample list of books a volume of short 
stories, "The Hounds of Banba"; a brief poetic play, 
"The Yellow Bittern"; and a prose drama, "The 
Labour Leader." There is prose-poetry in "The 
Hounds of Banba" of a breathless vitality, combining 
the fiery idealism of Pearse with the elfish fantasy of 
James Stephens. Naturally there is no laughter, for 
Corkery is writing down here, with an awesome sense 
of'definiteness, the soul of the rise of yesterday's young 
Ireland — an Ireland whose lips were set sternly and 
whose heart was high, where the banners breast the 
winds. Quite amazing is his fairness in the drawing 
of the picture: his ability to realize the dramatic value 
of opposition, which must have some human qualities 
to make the battle worth while. The prose here is the 
most delicately wrought Irish-English, if one may use 
the term; there is the eerie rhythm, the strenuous, 
magic phrase, the semi-barbaric virility of a strange 
new texture in our letters. 

"The Yellow Bittern" is only one of Corkery's 
poetic plays, but its tenderness would seem to be more 
acceptable to us than the fierce accents of some of the 
others. This story of the comfort which the Mother 
of God brought to a dying culprit has the lovely, sym- 
pathetic understanding of a tale done in the Ages of 
Faith. There are phrases here that catch at the heart 
and keep it fast, but in addition there is a very much 
greater thing — human nature dealt with humanly. If 
one goes now to "The Labour Leader" it is almost like 
proceeding from the poetry of Shakespeare to the dra- 
matic action of Shakespeare. Mr. Corkery has not 
yet learned how to combine the two things, but this 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 289 

play is a noteworthy performance. Davla, the Leader, 
is a man and a genius who dominates the stage, by rea- 
son of his innate reality, as one of the most vital per- 
sonages in recent dramatic literature. All in all, 
one is satisfied that Daniel Corkery has not inherited 
the vision of young Ireland unworthily. He has crea- 
tive instinct and power, splendid artistry, and delicacy 
of thought as well as of feeling. Of course, his writing 
may seem odd and in more ways than one a little sav- 
age ; but the Irish mind of today is no resting-place for 
classic decorum. 

One is glad to note in many writers not professedly 
Catholic a kindly appreciation of the dominant reli- 
gious feeling in Ireland. The folk-lore of Lady 
Gregory, the older fancies and narratives of Fiona 
McLeod, the tales of Stephen Gwynn, and the novels 
of Emily Lawless are splendid tributes, even though 
they emanate from comparative outsiders. An even 
more affectionate discernment seems to have guided the 
hand of Amy Murray, in whose "Father Allan's 
Island" the soul of western Ireland is caught up with 
its atmosphere. Miss Murray has not tinkered with 
her material, and unlike Synge has been unhampered 
by literary theories. To sum up the matter, one may 
express admiration for the novels that have come from 
Ireland without forgetting that their authors have 
largely lacked a guiding sense of form. The Celtic 
story-teller must learn to look at his country without 
tinted glasses and above all he must remember that, 
since the novel is not a primitive literary medium, fail- 
ure to conform to its traditions cannot be condoned. 

Since we have asserted that the Irish spirit is at bot- 
tom Catholic, some mention must be made of the artists 



290 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

who have elected to depart from it. George Moore is 
a great and gifted writer, but he is also a dead writer. 
For years he has been issuing successive farewells, in 
beautiful prose, when his Vale was in fact uttered early 
in his career. He chose to turn up his nose at the 
mother country and to follow, with rhythmic ease, the 
aesthetic dilettantism of the French decadents. As a 
result he is neither a decadent nor an Irishman; he is 
simply George Moore who has gone to the devil. It 
may be interesting to write impressionistic adaptations 
of the great French naturalists, but readers who find 
that sort of thing entertaining have scarcely exhausted 
the originals. Mr. Moore is not, as is often supposed, 
the living proof of the failure of the Irish literary tree 
to produce anything better than wild crabs, but instead 
a perfect demonstration of its fruitful vitality. He 
is the lovely dead branch. 

Moore's indubitable genius has, however, influenced 
many of his younger countrymen, and not the dullest 
among them. In "The Portrait of the Artist as a 
Young Man," James Joyce has rewritten the young- 
ster's confessions from a lower depth than Moore ever 
reached — one of the most wretched depths, in fact, that 
English literature has as yet revealed. Without doubt- 
ing the genuineness of the narrative, one may permis- 
sibly recall the fact that there have been quite a num- 
ber of similar confessions from people like Baudelaire, 
most of whom, grown older and wiser, counseled their 
friends to write in other strains. But while a great 
deal of recent Irish fiction is decidedly somber and pes- 
simistic, it cannot be accused simply of imitating the 
French naturalists. The average Irishman has looked 
upon himself and his compatriots a little too com- 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 291 

placently, perhaps; and a certain type of thinker, 
studying the facts by the light of alien literatures, has 
gnashed his teeth and sat down to tell the "truth." 
Such fiction as Brmsly McNamara's "Valley of the 
Squinting Windows" and Conal O'Riordan's "Adam of 
Dublin" — to mention only two striking books — are un- 
pleasant, but who shall deny their veracity? Where 
there is exaltation there is bound to be depression as 
well; where there is concern with art there is sure to 
be aesthetics. By a probably wise dispensation of 
nature not all men are idealists, and some of these 
break their hearts against the eternal stone of the 
world. In our emotional age the depression may easily 
become too deep, and the aesthetics too aesthetic. Some- 
thing of the kind has manifestly happened to Eimar 
O'Duffy, whose "Wasted Island" is quite too much of 
a travesty to mislead anyone. The case of Patrick 
MacGill, author of "Children of the Dead End" and 
"The Rat-Pit" is obviously different. He has grown 
absorbed in the social degeneration, the horrible un- 
fairness, of modern life, and has managed to say cer- 
tain things we ought to know. Unfortunately he him- 
self has become unfair. It would be easy to select 
from his books examples of what seem perilously like 
deliberate falsehoods. In consequence, as MacGill ad- 
mits, he has been spurned by the Irish and driven to 
ally himself with a little coterie of English radicals. 

The literature of Ireland will be formed by Irishmen 
as they elect. No pandering to outside preferences 
will aid the writing of the noble and sincere record of 
national life which some day will be found complete. 
Still, though she is a primeval, glowing, individual 
country, Ireland cannot hope, and should not desire, 



292 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to stand spiritually alone. Her literature must un- 
dergo formative influences; her place is in the world 
for the world. This has been very keenly appreciated 
by most writers who, like Synge and Moore, have ap- 
plied decadent methods and standards to Celtic ma- 
terial; and the danger from similar grafting is not to 
be brushed aside lightly. Oscar Wilde, too, was a fine 
Dublin temperament corroded by evil literary affilia- 
tions. We feel that for Irishmen nothing is of such very 
great importance as thoroughgoing alliance with the 
Catholic tradition of Europe, with the tradition which 
reared the soul of Ireland as well as the spirit of West- 
ern civilization. Tom Kettle had this firmly in mind 
always. "Ireland," he wrote, "awaits her Goethe who 
will one day arise to teach her that, while a strong 
nation has herself for center, she has the universe for 
circumference. . . . My only counsel to Ireland is that 
to become deeply Irish she must become European." 
It is towards the fulfillment of this wish that all lovers 
of Ireland will look forward hopefully, awaiting the 
increasingly fascinating revelation of the grandeur and 
the misery, the sorrow and the song, of the island which 
is the magnet for hearts in every part of the world. 
And we shall remember as a pledge that this island 
has been for centuries the training-ground of saints. 



BOOK NOTE 

The works mentioned in the text are only an indication of the 
wealth of modern Anglo-Irish literature, and many more might 
be added — Colum's "The Land," MacSwiney's "The Revolutionist," 
Mrs. Shorter's "The Dark Years" — were our canvas not already 
too crowded. Good literary references are: "The Literature of 
Ireland," by Thomas MacDonagh (an interpretation of the spirit 



THE VOICE OF IRELAND 293 

of Irish letters) ; "The Irish Literary Renaissance" (modern criti- 
cism tending to aestheticism) ; "A Literary History of Ireland," 
by Douglas Hyde (concerned chiefly with early Gaelic writers) ; 
"The Celtic Dawn," by F. R. Morris (a study of the revival of 
Irish tradition) ; "Studies in Irish Literature and Music," by 
Alfred P. Graves; and "Nova Hibernia," by Michael Monahan. 
A study of the Irish mental background may be prefaced by the 
reading of such books as "The Middle Years" and "The Dark 
Years," by Katherine Tynan Hinkson; "Celt and Saxon," by Shane 
Leslie; "Evening Memories," by William O'Brien; "The Soul of 
Ireland," by William J. Lockington; "Irish Impressions," by G. K. 
Chesterton; "Ireland," by Francis Hackett; "My Diaries," by 
Wilfrid Blunt; and "Canon Sheehan of Doneraile," by Alan 
Heuser. Almost indispensable poetic anthologies are : "Love Songs 
of Connaught," by Douglas Hyde; "A Treasury of Irish Poetry," 
by Brooke and Rolleston; and "A Book of Irish Poetry," edited, 
with a splendid introduction, by Wm. Butler Yeats. Miss L. I. 
Guiney prefaced her edition of Mangan's poems with an inter- 
pretative essay; "Poems," by Joseph Plunkett, has a foreword by 
Geraldine Plunkett and the poet's own paper on "Obscurity and 
Poetry"; "The Ways of War," by T. M. Kettle, has a charming 
"Memoir" by his wife. The periodical literature on the subject 
of Irish letters is extensive. Note especially, "The Literary Move- 
ment in Ireland," by George Birmingham, the Fortnightly Review, 
Dec, 1907; and "The Irish Literary Movement," by Padraic Colum, 
the Forum, Jan., 1915. 



CHAPTER SIXTEEN 

THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

"Keep the young generations in hail, 
And bequeath them no tumbled house." 

Meredith. 

THE study of Catholic opinion in the United 
States has characteristics that would not appeal 
to the proverbial cautious angel. One may 
calmly say that no words are sufficiently powerful to 
describe the energy, the determination and the sacrifice 
which have brought the Church to its present dignity 
and influence in the Republic; but certainly the times 
have been out of joint for the creation of intellectual 
leadership able to mould and guide Catholic opinion, 
nor has any large public been ready for such leader- 
ship. Emerson, speaking a kindly word for the 
"Romanist," classed him with the negro ; and if the 
American Catholic has learned anything thoroughly it 
is the art of making apologies. He has issued libraries 
in refutation of the astonishing charges that his priests 
have cloven feet and that his churches are stocked with 
ammunition. He has even proved triumphantly that 
the Papal fleet does not contemplate swooping down 
upon Chicago ! It is hardly surprising that such defer- 
ence to environment should have precluded a satisfac- 
tory telling of his own story, or that the literature 

294 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION £95 

which has arisen under the shadow of the American 
Church should largely be the work of converts. 

Linked by a thousand beautiful memories- — the vow 
of Columbus, the French and Spanish missions, the 
widespread dedication of places to the saints — with 
the tradition of Christendom, we have been forced to 
let others preserve them. Parkman is still, very likely, 
the best missionary historian, and the discovery of 
mediaeval society has been carried farthest by Henry 
Adams and Ralph Adams Cram. Hand in hand with 
this inarticulateness of the Catholic body has gone a 
corresponding deafness. The long, desperate battle 
with poverty and social inferiority left our ancestors, 
splendidly sturdy though they were, little time and 
opportunity for other things. 

But a great and significant change has taken place 
during the past few years. At length the leaders of 
the Church have seen the possible victory of the multi- 
tude they represent and have begun to talk plain, mar- 
tial English which is being more and more widely lis- 
tened to and understood. The opportunity for Catho- 
lic ideas grows larger, the obligation to emphasize them 
much more impressive. We are living in a new land 
that has changed its character and become old: the 
institutional clothes which fitted so snugly during the 
pliant era of development are found irksomely small, 
and the resultant democratic derision has almost im- 
periled the wearing of any such clothes whatever. 
Secure in her possession of immense economic power, 
closely combined and efficiently managed, America is 
mentally a wriggling mass of conflicting opinions. No- 
body, for instance, seems to know what the aims of our 
national existence are, though many persons tell us 



296 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rather frantically what they ought to be. Our varie- 
gated philosophies and religions do not merge, like 
colours, in clarity, but remain motley. Our citizenry, 
rushing here and there for some rule to go by, is the 
easy prey of blatant advertising and extravagant 
shams ; in so many cases is the American's intellectual 
history a series of scalps that one is not surprised to 
hear him say honestly, in the end, that he has lost his 
own. Accordingly, there is some genuine cause for 
alarm, lest a nation whose search for ideals is so evi- 
dent, so eager and so unsatisfactory, should rise in 
anger and break the shrines while cleansing the stables. 
Under such circumstances Catholic thought, no 
longer speechless, and released from provincialism, has 
a stirring opportunity to address the nation. What- 
ever people may say, Americans deeply respect tradi- 
tions and Catholicism is the Great Tradition. For a 
long while, representative thought in this country has 
followed in the wake of what has seemed the mental 
policy of Europe, provided that a certain element of 
"progressiveness" attended it. The New England 
transcendentalists walked behind the early German 
idealists when these were already old-fashioned; today 
our liberals are abreast of Mr. Wells in his youth, and 
our aesthetes are trying to create a naturalistic litera- 
ture after the fashion of France at a moment when 
that country has made an act of contrition. None of 
these matters has, however, satisfied very many people. 
For the great majority the prevailing idealism offers 
nothing substantial to build on, at least nothing that 
they can feel sure may not be blown suddenly into the 
middle of next week. And so disillusionment darkens 
very frequently the honest effort to escape material- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 297 

ism, to accomplish the primal task of hitching the 
wagon to a star. Eager though men may be for the 
freedom of a definite faith, it is not in the market-place 
that they will acquire the sense of eternal things, the 
sense of beauty, for instance. Our examination of our- 
selves will, therefore, be of practical value. It ought 
to make clear the causes which have led to the present 
condition of affairs, show what influence Catholics have 
exerted in the past, and uncover certain possibilities 
which can be made use of. 

Now the formation of American opinion is not a 
neatly catalogued affair, but it may be said, roughly, 
to fall into three divisions. First, there is the Puritan 
influence, a long-continued and largely successful exer- 
cise of power by a group of hard-mouthed and close- 
fisted Calvinists with a determination to conduct their 
part of the world as they saw fit. New England at first 
identified beauty with hell, so that while Cotton Mather 
was picturesquely augmenting the terrors of the 
damned, the prettiest girl in Salem was hanged as a 
witch. There was an admirable iron in the Puritan 
soul, but iron is not an artistic medium. The various 
annealing influences which stole in from Europe softened 
and moulded, but did not altogether succeed in trans- 
forming it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the disciple of 
Fichte and Swedenborg, sounded the first strong note 
of romantic rebellion, by assuming the existence in 
nature of a universal spirit which, because of his para- 
doxical individualism, he probably did not even care 
to prove. Moreover, one side of his mind looked to 
the future and he became the prophet of scientific pan- 
theism without ever really believing in it himself. 

Emerson's neighbour, Nathaniel Hawthorne, dwelt 



298 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spiritually in another country. Brooding over the re- 
lation between good and evil, he preached the moral 
retribution which is at the centre of Shakespeare's doc- 
trine, but removed his pulpit to a chillier region where 
no sun dispels a certain eerie twilight. In other words, 
Hawthorne awoke to beauty as Emerson to life, but 
neither shook off the dreamfulness of slumber. With 
the entry of two poets, Longfellow and Whitman, into 
the lists, a different struggle with Puritanism had be- 
gun. The author of "The Village Blacksmith" had an 
understanding of democracy, but no great vision of it ; 
the author of "O, Pioneers" had a vision of democracy, 
but understood it not. And Longfellow, the most cul- 
tured of poets, was also the most plebeian; Whitman, 
scorning civilization, was its autocratic aristocrat. 
Both contributed to a sorely needed renaissance of 
wonder, the one with memories of a blessed past, the 
other with a pagan to the future. To sum up the mat- 
ter, it may be said that the trend of Puritan thought 
as expressed in letters was toward a romantic idealism 
and away from realism. Based originally upon a de- 
nial of the world, it drifted with the lifting of the hori- 
zon out to the paler stars. 

It is a long way from the cold equality of Massa- 
chusetts to the provincial Toryism of the early South. 
According to all the rules, a literature should have been 
born to Virginia: there were both leisure and culture, 
a fondness for the literary traditions of England, and 
a certain gayety of spirit to which art is not averse. 
Nevertheless, it was just this culture and this leisure 
which diverted the energies of the best men to abstract 
questions and to action. The Southern colonies be- 
gan to bloom during that strange eighteenth century 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 299 

when there was nowhere any great art, but instead a 
universal concern with the principles of government 
and the possible reconstruction of society. This was 
the age when the ripest minds tried to keep abreast of 
Rousseau and Voltaire, of Gibbon and Hobbes. Thus 
the guiding spirits of the Revolution were Washington 
and Jefferson, the one the highest type of honest busi- 
ness man, the other absorbed with a dream of democracy 
in the abstract which stamps him in many ways as the 
greatest genius in constructive theory that America 
has produced. There was something in the fiber of 
Virginian society which saved it from excess; it was 
preserved from ruin by the resiliency of another typi- 
cally eighteenth century mind, Benjamin Franklin. All 
of this, which suffered the eclipse of the arts with la- 
mentable tranquillity, did in the end make for the ap- 
pearance of a very individual and abstract literary 
genius, Edgar Allan Poe. The whole point about this 
strange man is that he was a rationalist almost to the 
verge of insanity, while the New England that viewed 
him askance was irrational both in its Puritan repres- 
sion and in its idealistic escape. Nobody but a dullard 
would urge against Poe's art that he had no strength 
of character, for surely he had as much as Villon or 
Verlaine, but it is very true that he made no charac- 
ters, no people, to fill those haunting parallelograms 
that he built of horrors. The same conception of liter- 
ary material appears in the verse of Sidney Lanier, a 
totally different man. If any American poet is authen- 
tic it is the author of the "Symphony" and "The 
Marshes of Glynn." Still, in these and more clearly 
in his poorer poems, the pressure of the abstract idea 
is present : concepts of a better social order, of a purer 



300 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

democracy, of a spiritually conducted commerce. To 
this day the South has not shaken off its eighteenth 
century characteristics. 

With the migration of thousands to the West, how- 
ever, the attitude of America towards its own destiny 
underwent a stimulating change. Straggling little vil- 
lages in which the primitive communal instinct was 
strong, the long, lone trails to the gold mines, and the 
stirring venturesomeness of a life under elemental con- 
ditions produced a race of men whose chief mental 
trait was a sort of twinkling sadness, an ability to dis- 
pel profound melancholy with titanic laughter. It is 
significant to note that the two men whose instinct for 
realism was the sharpest descended from Virginian 
people — Lincoln and Mark Twain. The superlative 
common sense of the great President was mixed with in- 
tense sympathy with the common man; Mark Twain 
was little except a common man until the end. There 
were dozens of Westerners in days gone by who could 
have told the story of "Life on the Mississippi" with 
gusto and understanding, and who had shared gener- 
ously in boyhood the exploits of Huckleberry Finn. 
Unfortunately, the chief virtue of Samuel Clemens, self- 
reliance, is powerless against the tragic history of the 
ages and is no bulwark against the flood of honest 
thought. He learned in the end that life which he had 
jested with so merrily could laugh last. And he had 
found nothing to soften the cruelty of its smiling lips. 

On the other hand, William Dean Howells and Bret 
Harte, who sponsored most successfully the delicate 
and idealistic qualities in the temperament of the rising 
West, were of Puritan ancestry. They did not rail at 
existence or drink it down with gulps of laughter, but 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 301 

accepted it tranquilly, with a geniality often close to 
tears. In Bret Harte's best work there is the honest 
sentimentality of a pioneer with a taste for Victorian 
fiction; in Howells the idealism of a frontier doctor 
who has been reading Tolstoi. All this literature of 
the expanse, which came out of the Civil War, resembled 
it in the inner conflict between Northerner and Virgin- 
ian, between the older provincialism and the coming 
nation. It is significant that the style of every one 
of these authors should have been modeled on the Bible, 
which was the older America's literary and spiritual 
food; this explains both the domination of the Puritan 
teaching and the limitations of American culture. In 
such ways, with additions made from all sides, by Tho- 
reau and Holmes in New England, by Cooper and Irv- 
ing in New York, by Cable and Simms in the South, by 
Joaquin Miller and Artemus Ward in the West, the lit- 
erary tastes of the Republic were formed. 

Now it is apparent that the influence of the Catholic 
idea on the shaping of American literary destinies had 
necessarily to depend upon the conversion of able men. 
The early missionary efforts of Frenchmen and Span- 
iards had been rendered neglible by the Anglo-Saxon 
advance, and the hordes of Irish and German immi- 
grants were not yet ready for self-expression. In gen- 
eral, literary converts were attracted to the Church 
by one of two things : a firm solution of intellectual dif- 
ficulties or the beauty of Catholic faith and worship. 
They discovered in the synthesis of the Christian past 
either an answer to questions which had become cen- 
tral in their lives or strong support for viewing the 
world as the lovely garment of God. It was natural 
that in the East the Catholic writers should be those 



302 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

for whom philosophic inquiry guided life, and we con- 
front at once the puzzling figure of Orestes A. Brown- 
son. This man of logic, adept at debate and scornful 
of the trivial, underwent almost every kind of religious 
experience open to Americans. Successively a Pres- 
byterian, a Universalist, an associate of Robert Owen, 
a Unitarian minister, a Saint-Simonian pamphleteer, a 
religious disciple of Matthew Arnold, and a spiritist, 
when Brownson turned Catholic at the age of forty-one, 
he came armed with vast empirical knowledge to do bat- 
tle with his foes. During the years when Brownson con- 
ducted his famous Review, Emerson was at the height 
of his renown and Emerson accordingly became the 
target. There can be no question about the victory of 
Brownson, but the Concord sage is safe from oblivion 
because he was a poet and because he took the trouble 
to write well. Brownson was probably incapable of a 
quatrain and his style has that aridity which is the 
curse of all mere pamphleteering. His best work is 
"The American Republic," a thorough and subtle anal- 
ysis of the principles upon which this government is 
based and also a study of popular rule in the broader 
sense. Some of his philosophical discussion has the 
same sort of value as Jonathan Edwards' "Freedom of 
the Will"; the two men had much in common that is 
admirable: verve of intellect, devotion to spiritual 
causes, and relentless abnegation of self in the search 
for truth. Brownson lacked the amiable qualities of 
the artist, and though his name is held in reverence, 
only his staunch admirers save him from oblivion. 

Great literary renown has likewise passed by the 
interesting figure of Father Isaac Hecker, an idealistic 
man of German descent, whose share in the Brook Farm 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 303 

experiment and other diversions of the more emanci- 
pated Puritans had been large. Upon becoming a 
Catholic and a priest, Hecker spurred the most prom- 
ising of his friends to literary activity, being convinced 
that the idea of Christendom as a system of thought 
and belief could sway the hearts of millions in America. 
His personal eagerness to engage in this task left small 
room for writing of his own, although he is the author 
of at least one book that can still be read with pleasure, 
"The Church and the Age." One knew that Father 
Hecker grasped things and understood the times in 
which he moved; from England Newman wrote to him 
as to a kindred spirit, engaged in the same apostolate. 
Together with Brownson he typifies the response which 
a great many intellectual New Englanders made to 
Catholicism: the recognition of dogma as an escape 
alike from unbalanced idealism and materialistic de- 
spair. Unfortunately neither of them possessed the 
literary gifts which would have made their testimony 
irresistible. 

Among the men who gave expression to the spirit of 
the American migration, surely none is more charming 
or more neglected than Charles Warren Stoddard. 
This most gentle of all Bohemians, who sent Stevenson 
off to the South Seas and was beloved of Harte, Clemens, 
and Miller, was so oddly and delightfully himself that 
the common streets of literature have never led to his 
domain. Where is there a more fascinating book of 
essays than "South Sea Idyls," which are scented with 
the perfume of the choicest flowers that open to a tropi- 
cal sunrise? Its gossamer pages were surely written 
in fairyland to the music of the Hawaiian paradise. 
Lafcadio Hearn has no more poetry and a great deal 



304 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

less of other things. Then there is "The Island of 
Tranquil Delights," "Poems," and "A Troubled Heart" 
— the lyric, moving story of Stoddard's spiritual life. 
More than any other Western writer, perhaps, he was 
responsive to the elusive voice of beauty. Without any 
noticeable concern with the problems of civilization, a 
wanderer through the misty valleys of the world, he 
served the melody of the heart with chivalric tender- 
ness. Pilgrim to the West, voyager to the distant and 
then mysterious islands of the Pacific, and wayfarer 
to Europe, he was moved to delight by all. If there 
is tender loveliness in his memories of Wai-ki-ki, it is 
matched by the dream-vision in Anne Hathaway's house, 
of which he tells in "Exits and Entrances." 

Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York, educated 
in the East and suffered to seek a literary career in 
San Francisco. What repelled him from the various 
forms of Puritan belief to which he had been introduced 
was simply the crudity of their spiritual appeal. A 
man born to culture and sensitive to the mystic voices 
that speak to the soul, he found his place ultimately 
within the ancient confines of the Church. There lay 
about the man an aura, intangible and elfish, which 
even the greatest of his contemporaries bowed to, 
which inspired Stevenson to unbend in loving doggerel, 
moved Clemens to read the book of Ruth with tears in 
his eyes, and enthralled the pupils — for fifteen years 
he taught English literature — who sat under him. 
During the last years of his life, mystical things ab- 
sorbed his attention more and more; without ever 
abandoning a whimsical interest in life, he drew closer 
to the saints and sought out with care instances of 
superior devotion and even of communication with the 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 305 

world beyond. How has it happened that a man so 
innately a genius should be for the majority of his 
countrymen scarcely a memory? 

To some extent the answer may be found, perhaps, 
in the fact that Stoddard's art was unconnected with 
the giving of highly moral lessons, while Americans are 
nothing if not ethical, spending their time prodigally 
in reforming the modes and methods of society. The 
Puritan whose hand has guided the national life still 
insists that man lives for the betterment of his neigh- 
bor's habits, that uplift must be accomplished some- 
how by "getting" religion, money, isms, or dynamite. 
Now Stoddard was perversely opposed to all of this — 
to lugubrious psalmody and store clothes for heath- 
enish islanders, to politicians and platforms, yes even 
to professional uplifters, for the rest of the world. It 
is to be feared that he believed the pursuit of beauty 
and the salvation of the soul quite similar and of indi- 
vidual concern. Again, he was not a novelist, a critic, 
or even in any important sense a writer of verse, but al- 
most exclusively an essayist. But an essayist must 
rely for his success chiefly upon style, and Americans 
have grown quite indifferent to that in a search for 
mammoth ideas and epoch-making phrases. Stoddard's 
art is like the laughing spray that leaps from a wood- 
land waterfall. Modeled upon the rhythmic weave of 
English Bible diction, the sentences of such a sketch as 
"The Island of Tranquil Delights" combine Oriental 
dreamfulness with the bright, optimistic humour of 
western America. Stoddard's spiritual nature shrank 
from the slightest taint of coarseness and his pen wan- 
dered among the savages "who came as they were cre- 
ated" with the jovial innocence of nature. That verbal 



306 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rainbow "South Sea Idyls," is a-twinkle with points of 
golden laughter; within its tropic colours burn the 
American street lamps. In the deeper melody of "The 
Lepers of Molokai," with its majestic prose hymn to 
the melancholy surf, in the tranquil intimacies of "A 
Troubled Heart," there is the same delicate realiza- 
tion of beauty. No one in that famous brotherhood 
of Calif ornian humourists had so subtle a sense of fun ; 
his work was made for the ambrosia cells of memory, 
priceless for those who prize it. Stoddard accepted the 
Catholic tradition humbly, because it is beautiful ; and 
since he had been a captive, he became in the end a will- 
ing and exalted soldier. 

In the older South, where the beauty of ancient chiv- 
alry was followed in spite of the crime of slavery and 
the languour resultant from too violent a concern with 
pure politics, there was much to smile at but also a 
great deal to admire on bended knees. Warriors in 
whose veins ran kindness, like blessed wine; a genuine, 
if somewhat sentimental respect for beauty; and poets 
like Lanier to overhear the whispers of life: these were 
the best things in a pleasant civilization that found its 
apogee and its defeat in Robert Lee. With the ap- 
pearance of a reticent priest, John Bannister Tabb, 
the Catholic Spirit found expression in lovable form. 
Father Tabb, who was a convert, had served with the 
Confederates and been the friend of Sidney Lanier; 
somehow he learned how to take care of his soul and 
how to write. It is scarcely necessary to describe 
poems that everybody knows — tiny lyrics of six or 
eight lines which are more like bird-notes than songs. 
Yet what fulness of melody there is in the cry of the 
lark and what long colloquies in the quatrains of 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 307 

Father Tabb! He speaks from "the primal tone," 
making what one may call miniatures of infinity. The 
religious tenderness of such poems as "The Christ 
Child to the Christmas Lamb" and "The Old Pastor," 
the Franciscan sympathy with natural things so evi- 
dent in "The Shell" or "The Haunted Moon," baffle 
analysis because they adhere to the simplicity of a very 
simple genius. His life was plain, too, and spent in 
the routine of the priesthood or in teaching boys the 
rules of rhetoric. Of course he had a shy, playful 
humour that smiled at long days and befriended the 
stars. Having found serenity in the faith to which he 
was a convert he could say, in the words of his poem, 

"A life of exile long 

Hath taught thee song." 

We have said that Father Tabb's verse, being mini- 
mum in minimo, mocks at dissection; and yet one can- 
not help trying. This poet always retained so much 
of the boy that no matter how many years of reflection 
he might give to the turgid flood of information sup- 
plied by experience and learning, the song that resulted 
finally was certain to select only those things which 
are everlastingly human. A decade passed sometimes 
before the lyric he wished to make had hardened, cameo- 
like, under the impress of his spirit, but it was sure in 
the end to seem perfectly spontaneous. Take for in- 
stance that most arresting poem, "Evolution." People 
had been talking very much about Evolution — talking 
so freely, in fact, that man's relation to the theory was 
quite forgotten or hectically misstated. Now Father 
Tabb succeeded in condensing the human interest of the 
scientific hypothesis into four little lines, each one of 



308 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which is, however, of almost mountainous spiritual 
hugeness. 

"Out of the dusk a shadow, 
Then a spark" ; 

What an image of light creeping out of chaos and 
standing suddenly, feebly, over the void! Then 

"Out of the cloud a silence, 
Then a lark." 

Life, with all its beauty, activeness, aspiration is ex- 
pressed by a single word; and the marvelous charac- 
teristic of these verses is the fact that "lark" and 
"spark," in each of which there is a cosmic image, 
seem accidental, almost comic, rhymes. The next four 
lines complete the cycle by applying "Evolution" to 
the earthly and then to the eternal life of man: 

"Out of the heart a rapture, 
Then a pain" 

A rapture and a pain — these indeed are as good a 
summing-up of our existence as any sentence from 
Pascal. Finally, 

"Out of the dead, cold ashes, 
Life again!" 

Note the positive thrill of those two lines. Men can- 
not in the end fail to surrender to such poetry, and the 
fame of Father Tabb has, as a matter of fact, risen 
by such leaps and bounds that we need say nothing 
more about it. His art smiles, a little satirically per- 
haps, at the gush of free and easy versifiers. 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 309 

Quite different in character are the poems of Father 
Abram Ryan, whose identification with the Southern 
cause gave some of his best stanzas a martial rhythm 
and a rugged pathos. "The Conquered Banner" is one 
of the truest of American patriotic songs, even though 
it was written for a broken cause. One turns, how- 
ever, with greater eagerness to the plain but resonant 
stanzas of "The Song of the Mystic," a hymn that 
praises contemplation with no touch of merely literary 
ecstasy. Nor could anyone excepting a poet originate 
the haunting figure of Uncle Remus. Although none 
of Joel Chandler Harris' work is distinctly Catholic, 
it developed from that genuine charity and kindly faith 
which he crowned with his conversion. 

Thus, in diverse ways and in the face of stern popu- 
lar opposition to "Romanish perversion," these repre- 
sentative Americans came to accept the Catholic idea 
and to give it a place in letters. While their isolation 
from any large and appreciative audience and their 
limited understanding of tradition deprived their work 
of much influence, it will remain significant as the pow- 
erful and unsolicited testimony of native Americans to 
a view of life which was then thought foreign and ab- 
surd. Soon, however, the power of a vast immigrant 
population would make itself felt; while the Germans 
remained silent, guarding their customs and language, 
the Church came to be represented largely by Irishmen 
whose literary work is something like an interlude be- 
tween older and modern days. In John Boyle O'Reilly 
an ancient and oppressed people spoke. Exiled to 
Australia as a Fenian, O'Reilly escaped to America and 
began a successful journalistic career with the develop- 
ment of the Boston Pilot to a great and representative 



310 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Catholic newspaper. He was a man of verve and mental 
resiliency, with a strong undercurrent of poetic feel- 
ing. This found expression in four books of verse, 
among which "Songs of the Southern Seas" is the best. 
There is melody and experience in his lyrics, but their 
glaring imperfection of form forestalls any generous 
appraisal of their value. Vastly better, it may be 
thought, is the novel "Moondyne," forgotten now, but 
well-done and invaluable as an account of strange life 
in Australia. 

O'Reilly, like Meagher and other Celtic revolution- 
aries, showed a buoyant readiness to adopt American 
views, but a much more striking grasp of national con- 
ditions was displayed by John Ireland, Archbishop of 
Saint Paul, and counterpart of Manning. Educated 
in France and given spiritual charge of the great 
Northwest, Ireland understood that a rapidly changing 
world presented opportunities that must be seized vig- 
orously. Viewed as the response of a great construc- 
tive mind to the problems created by an expanding 
civilization, "The Church and Society" is a remark- 
able book. It takes rank beside Webster's "Orations" 
and Roosevelt's "Americanism" as an appeal to the 
American spirit, and to Catholics it gives, in spite 
of a tendency to chauvinism, a needed tonic. A more 
purely literary blend of the Celtic spirit with the Ameri- 
can background is seen in the work of Maurice Fran- 
cis Egan, poet, essayist, and novelist. The sonnets of 
his earlier career are not altogether unworthy of com- 
parison with those he translated so gracefully from 
the French, and his essays, while uneven, have a charm 
of style that compensates for a general superficiality 
of thought. Egan's besetting sin has been compla- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 311 

cency with his gracefulness; gifted with the rarest 
qualities, he has shirked the mental discipline which 
alone can give writing its sea legs. 

While these Irish writers represent the period of 
mental adjustment, it must be remembered that pecu- 
liar conditions — the indifference of the general public 
and the absence of strong, cultivated Catholic opinion 
— continue to enforce modesty upon the majority of 
our authors. Miss Guiney retreated to England and 
Crawford became a cosmopolite. Nevertheless, there 
remains a group of writers to be regarded with pride. 
In the essay Agnes Repplier rules supreme; conserva- 
tive but decidedly not old-fashioned, she applies to the 
romantic effusions of popular thinkers the acid test 
of intelligence. In her hands the essay becomes a 
weapon quite like a corrosive chemical. It has wit, 
boundless learning, a calm common sense, and perfect 
form; it dispels shams as some caustic insect powder 
drives away gnats, and takes up a position not likely to 
be molested. Miss Repplier is the ghost of Jane Austen 
wedded to the spirit of Montaigne. An entirely dif- 
ferent standard was adopted by James Gibbons 
Huneker who, while not a consistent Catholic, did in- 
terpret for Americans some of the finest religious 
writers of Europe. He was a Bohemian with an ultra- 
impressionistic mind that worked like a furiously ac- 
tive motion-picture camera. Without the solid grasp 
of principles which lifts the philosophic critic above 
the fashions of the hour, he proved an admirable re- 
flector and brought to the attention of many critics 
tendencies which they would otherwise have overlooked. 
Huneker was Pateresque, but more human and less 
humanistic. 



312 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Catholic fiction has suffered from the same ailments 
that have afflicted the American novel in general. Ob- 
sessed by abstract ideas, schemes of reform, and a 
theory that art is designed for our weaker-minded 
sisters, we have given, at best, only a mediocre version 
of American life, a version that has satisfied so well 
the tastes of the great majority of readers that nothing 
else is likely to be commercially successful. The great 
bulk of American Catholic fiction is unintelligent and 
unreadable. There are, however, a few redeeming names 
which may give us counsel and hope for the future. 
In "Robert Kimberly," by Frank Spearman, one finds 
a study of a moral issue in modern life that is done 
with finesse and dramatic power. It has the feel of 
reality and a rounded organic structure that connotes 
mastery in story-telling. The earlier works of Richard 
Aumerle Maher, especially "The Shepherd of the 
North," are strong, colourful, and appealingly Catho- 
lice The novels of John Talbot Smith have many 
faults, but also virtues like plot and crisp brevity of 
narrative. Such a story as "The Art of Disappear- 
ing," probably Father Smith's best, fails by an inch of 
being great ; there is too much straining for effect, too 
little real charm of diction, and an overdose of the 
bizarre. Christian Reid has endeared herself to thou- 
sands by such stories as "A Light of Vision" and "The 
Coin of Sacrifice," tales of spiritual struggle that miss 
being effective by becoming too spirituelle. The reader 
is likely to compare her books with those virtuous but 
underfed virgins who preside over charity bazaars. 
These authors have, however, done much to present the 
Catholic idea, and others have been kind enough \& 
second their efforts. What book, for instance, could 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 313 

be more Catholic in tone than Mrs. Jackson's moving 
story of "Ramona," surely one of the few great ro- 
mances in American literature? There is now a real 
opportunity for genuinely conceived fiction. A vigor- 
ous resolve to spurn, as unworthy of a great artistic 
tradition, the trivial and technically abominable books 
now so prevalent, and a patient deference to the mas- 
ters of the art in other lands, will do much towards 
giving the Catholic novel in this country an honourable 
reputation. 

What we may honestly be proud of, however, is the 
poetry that has been written in our name. At a time 
when verse making, too, has turned into tractarian or 
naturalistic channels, the Catholic singers have in- 
sisted on song. Not in murmuring melodies from no- 
where, but in finding their voices in the turmoil of to- 
day, have they grown beautiful and reputable. They 
have come together, Heaven knows how, like a band of 
troubadours. Joyce Kilmer, Thomas Walsh, and 
Thomas A. Daly have stood abreast in an unusual con- 
spiracy of song. Kilmer was probably not a great 
poet, but he was great enough to be thoroughly alive. 
Writing and living with the intensity of a chevalier, he 
put to music the simple things around him so that they 
were no longer simple: trees became instinct with the 
soul's tenderness and the delicatessen store was almost 
the ante-room of Paradise. Kilmer the humble suc- 
ceeds always, but Kilmer the ambitious occasionally 
fails. "The White Ships and the Red"— which is Ches- 
tertonian in theme — seems a little too lurid for life, 
while "A Blue Valentine" — which is Patmorean — is al- 
most too good to be true. Of his final service in a cause 
which he visioned clearly, everyone will speak with 



314 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

reverent sadness, thinking of the many songs that went 
with him to death. 

For Walsh, however, the commonplace is not an in- 
spiration; he finds the source of melody in Spanish 
gardens and the courts of kings. No other American 
poet writes blank verse so full and melodious, so charged 
with brooding and beauty. He has visioned the mina- 
rets of the Faith and sung of splendid memories that 
are American because they came with Columbus and 
the missionaries of Spain. The verse of T. A. Daly, 
delicate and whimsical, is quite different in character; 
couched in dialect or written in smooth English, it 
hides under the simple pathos of an Irish or Italian 
lyric cry the perfection of technique. Then there are 
others : Father O'Donnell, whose poems reflect the mys- 
tic delight of Thompson; J. Corson Miller, calm and 
classic in manner; Father Earls, who voices the quiet 
of a tranquil mind in noble stanzas ; Aline Kilmer, who 
sings of the joy and pathos of domestic life; and last, 
John Bunker, who burns incense to the nature with 
whose moods he is lovingly familiar. For these all 
may God be thanked ; through them whisper the hymns 
of faithful ages that wrought miracles of song, and the 
praise of virtues that have almost been forgotten. 

Our survey of American Catholic literature has re- 
vealed no list of giant names, no magic success in the 
wresting of beauty from daily life, but it has brought 
to light noble effort and artistic discernment. What 
gauge these are for the future no one can tell. It is 
quite generally admitted that the close of the war 
opened a new page in the history of America. The 
total collapse of Puritanism as a force able to guide 
popular thought, and the discovery of materialistic 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 315 

murk at the basis of our civilization, has set the im- 
mense national caldron of unassimilated minds to seeth- 
ing ominously. With a thousand problems to solve, 
Americans are confronted with ten thousand answers. 
The smug complacency of the money-lenders, the glare 
of foul advertising, and the decay of religious stand- 
ards were commonplace matters before the war, but 
now are extraordinary. In the face of the call to 
death, men discovered how little there was to die for. 
There will be no peace until the philosophy which is to 
dominate America has been settled upon to the satis- 
faction of the multitude. Captains may dicker with 
their subjects, and generals give orders; but surely 
none of these dare hope to deceive, in the end, the In- 
tense scrutiny of the mob. 

Catholic social action has come forward, speaking an 
earnest word and rousing to united action a mighty 
army that has slept. For the first time in the history 
of America, the tread of the Church has been heard 
in the market-place. What we have to say is neither 
new nor bizarre: it is simply our determination that 
the primal beliefs of America are not to be bartered 
away, that the spiritualization of democracy is fea- 
sible, and that there is such a thing as the right to daily 
bread. We have remembered our heritage from the 
society of Christendom. It is a splendid protest, splen- 
didly spoken, but we know that it is not enough. Some- 
how the instincts of the soul are instincts of beauty, 
and the things that men love are useful but also topped 
with glory. During the long past of Christendom the 
sun has fallen on towers that are like cataracts of 
stone, on cities radiant with the splendour of our idea 
of heaven; always and everywhere the Catholic artist 



316 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

has labored to image the majesty of the kingdom of God 
in the simple things which surrounded 'him. Our task 
is to do the same here : not to rear occult and extrava- 
gant edifices or to write books of subtle and dangerous 
colour, but to transfigure the life around us, ugly 
though it may seem and weak though we may be, into 
an existence which is worthy of man. Our place is not 
merely in the politics of the world, but also in its spiri- 
tual abundance ; ours are the spires of Notre-Dame and 
the tables of the Lord. 

BOOK NOTE 

The following general works may be found useful: "The Cam- 
bridge History of American Literature"; "American Literature," 
by W. P. Trent; "American Literature since 1870," by F. L. 
Pattee. For the special point of view offered in this chapter, see 
"Father Tabb," by Jennie M. Tabb; "The Life of Orestes A. 
Brownson," by Henry F. Brownson, and "The Convert," by O. A. 
Brownson; "The Life of Father Hecker," by W. Elliott; and 
"Steeplejack," by J. G. Huneker. For information about Joyce 
Kilmer, see the introductions to the three volumes of his "Works," 
by R. C. Holliday; about Stoddard, see "Apostrophe to a Sky- 
lark," by G. W. James; "A Troubled Heart"— Stoddard's religious 
autobiography — and the Ave Maria for June, 1909; about Arch- 
bishop Ireland, see an article by J. Talbot Smith in the Dublin 
Review, January, 1921. The "Catholic Encyclopedia" may fre- 
quently be consulted with profit. 



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 

LITERATURE AND THE VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 

"While Kings of eternal evil 
Yet darken the hills about, 
Thy part is with broken saber 
To rise on the last redoubt." 

Louise Imogen Guiney. 



THIS book has been written — if it must be 
weighted down with a purpose — to make clear 
that a portion of modern English literature is 
definitely Catholic in spirit, that it represents the 
Catholic mind; and a general view of the subject will, 
therefore, not be out of place here at the end. We 
have seen, first of all, that it was essential, in a country 
where the ancient traditions of Christendom had been 
discarded or discoloured, that the past should be 
brought to light again as it really was, with no dis- 
paragement of the truth and beauty of its culture. 
While the romantic movement, particularly as repre- 
sented by Scott, may be said to have become acquainted 
with the people of the Ages of Faith, it was on the 
whole too superficial and fanciful to revive the reality 
of their society. The characters evolved by the roman- 
ticist were, so to speak, galvanized into a modern at- 
titude. Kenelm Digby was the first great English 

317 



318 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

writer to see the Middle Ages as they ought to be seen, 
to group the picturesque qualities of the time round 
the profound social unity which they coloured, and to 
understand the soul of Europe as a Catholic would 
understand it. Even if one cannot say that the author 
of "Mores Catholici" was a literary genius, surely it 
is not wrong to call him a genius simply, by reason of 
his remarkable discernment of a buried world. Others 
would exploit the discovered country ; and John Ruskin 
preached a comely gospel of beauty from the texts of 
his master. 

But no Catholic who is really alive would spend much 
time dreaming of the reign of Saint Louis or the hey- 
day of the Schools, solely for their own sakes, or be- 
cause he believed them models after which society could 
be refashioned. The point of the medievalist is simply 
this: the spirit which informed mediaeval life is latent 
and can be made effective in modern life, a- philosophy 
which really worked out should again become a working 
philosophy. It was the great service of Newman, the 
most scientific mind in modern England, to have under- 
stood this truth in its myriad ramifications. With a 
grasp of history that seems amazingly acute and com- 
plete, Newman went to work upon the spirit of his age 
by analyzing its horizons. Moving a full step ahead 
of the time he guessed its limitations ; he went from the 
equator of English thought to the poles and left no 
intermediate land unvisited. His work was, of course, 
mental and aimed at the conversion, the renovation, of 
the English point of view. The more immediate and 
concrete matters he was willing to leave to others. 

Those others were not wanting. A great body of 
poets engaged in the very practical business of song 



UTERATTTRE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 319 

with gifts that will in the end be ranked with those of 
Wordsworth and Browning. The impetus given to the 
action of the Catholic Spirit upon social problems by 
Cardinal Manning was accepted with devotion by 
many other able men. It became also the chief interest 
of a powerful group of pamphleteers at the head of 
whom have stood the Chestertons, W. S. Lilly, and 
Belloc, History has been written from the Catholic 
point of view by some of the ablest among its masters ; 
fiction has taken on the allurement of faith ; eloquence, 
philosophy, journalism — the multiform endeavours of 
the modern literary movement have engaged the powers 
of notable Catholic writers. There is not a department 
of English letters that has not profited by the expres- 
sion of the spirit of Christendom. All this has been 
accomplished in a country which a hundred years ago 
scoffed at the name of Rome and which scorned nothing 
so deeply as the memory of the Faith which had once 
crowned England with the glory of its handiwork. Add 
the fruitful appeal of the Catholic voice in Ireland and 
the growing power of its utterance in America, and 
you have a magnificent force, creative of truth and 
beauty for the world. 

Seen thus in its entirety, the literature which we 
have examined is a most impressive spectacle. Let us 
use the word "spectacle" because it implies 'that the 
matter is quite visible, although it has been overlooked 
often enough. In no weapon has the philosophy which 
is anti-Catholic seen such power as in silence. And yet 
we have become too tall to be ignored; we have talked 
too much to be termed mute; we have stood in the 
market-place too long to be thought hermits. Clearly 
the Catholic presence is quantitatively important ; and 



320 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the only thing we still have to do is to consider briefly 
its inner value, the worth of its principles as standards 
in art. We recognize very fully that Catholic letters 
must not be separated from the world at large, or lim- 
ited to a body of thought which is not directly con- 
cerned with the life of the time. The pages of this 
book have shown, it is hoped, some of the relations 
which have actually existed between the current we have 
been following and the surrounding domain of English 
literary art. The creative power of the Catholic Spirit 
has worked with the materials of the age and has been 
subject to its influences, joyfully and in the spirit of 
service. 

Now what have been the conclusions of the modern 
time concerning the purpose and nature of art? We 
naturally think broadly of literature as expressing first 
the individual and then society. We feel that what 
distinguishes it from mere writing, is creative sin- 
cerity. An artist must know and be able to express 
human nature as it actually is. Unless he has divined 
correctly the mixture of aspiration and perverse in- 
stinct that constitutes an individual; unless he under- 
stands concretely the dream, the resolve, the prayer, 
and the effort that lead to heroism or towards it, as well 
as the inner egoism so seldom subdued, the reverie of 
passion, the urge to lust, and the petty misery of unfed 
mentality that induce ugliness and spiritual subser- 
vience, the artist is not in the end accepted by hu- 
manity. The false ring of his coinage will betray his 
counterfeiting, and nothing will save him from the de- 
rision of the stocks. In a similar way, literature must 
be based upon a recognition of elemental social truths. 
The artist need not be a scientist or even a strict phi- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 321 

losopher, but he must comprehend intuitively the reali- 
ties of collective life. He must see, for instance, that 
Arcadia is not situated just twenty-four miles outside 
any large city; that the success of marriage as an in- 
stitution is not based entirely upon an exchange of 
kisses by May moonlight; and that all ladies are not 
immediately susceptible to all traveling men. In short, 
literature must adopt not merely the common language, 
but also common sense. 

These things are simply the result of intelligence 
looking sanely upon the world it seeks to express. That 
expression cannot, however, be purposeless, simply be- 
cause there is no such thing in human life as intelli- 
gence acting utterly apart from an exercise of the will. 
Experience may force upon us the consciousness of 
facts, but it cannot create that harmonious grasp and 
orderly representation of facts which we call artistic 
truth; and, therefore, diversity of moral outlook in- 
troduces, despite the objectiveness of the real world, a 
kind of relativity into art. It is this which explains 
the manifold differences between the extremes of what 
are called realism and romance. With these we are 
not concerned here; but it is evident that the creator 
of literature must be guided by principles, and the 
great conflict of criticism rages round what those prin- 
ciples are in practice and should be in theory. State- 
ments concerning them are varied, but none seem on the 
whole more ample or more nearly correct than those 
set down by Matthew Arnold, whom we quote the more 
readily because he was not a Catholic. 

In his essay on "The Function of Criticism at the 
Present Time," Arnold says: ". . . the elements with 
which the creative power works are ideas : the best ideas 



322 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

on every matter which literature touches, current at the 
time," and goes on to draw the inference that criti- 
cism is "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propa- 
gate the best that has been known and thought in the 
world." This statement appears to be substantially 
correct, although the emphasis is probably too strong 
on simple intelligence ; surely there is some room also 
for the best that has been felt in the world. To the 
substantial elements of knowledge and insight the ar- 
tist must add the less tangible but equally necessary 
forces of form and feeling, the vitamines of literature. 
Guided by the light of eternal verities, he will not for- 
get the soil of the land through which ^he passes. Such 
a standard Catholic writing is ready to adopt and to 
practice faithfully, but the question naturally arises: 
What is the best, and what manner of expression is 
most befitting it? Arnold insisted upon the separation 
of the world of ideas from the 'lower* sphere of practi- 
cal considerations and sectarian opinions. This is 
probably a Cartesian principle, but without criticizing 
it here, let us see whether great liberty and tolerant 
breadth are incompatible with the Catholic point of 
view. 



II 



Nothing could be more false than the impression that 
the Catholic creed acts as a curb upon thought. As a 
matter of fact, one of the foremost advantages to be 
gained from an acceptance of that creed is freedom. 
One can belong to the Church without being required 
to believe in any of the rigid specialties of the modern 
mind; one may be an evolutionist or none; a prohibi- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 323 

tionist or none; even, it might be added, a sinner or 
none. The Catholic has not one rule of faith but two ; 
in a more earthly sphere he may be an employer or a 
laborer, an Englishman or an Irishman, a pacifist or 
a warrior. The Church has always most firmly op- 
posed encroachments upon the rightful liberty of the 
individual ; she has denounced state monopolies such as 
Socialism, religious sects which, like the Flagellantes, 
stake everything upon an eccentric observance, and 
movements within the fold which tend to sacrifice uni- 
versality for nationalism. During the nineteenth cen- 
tury she was accused by Napoleon of being un-French ; 
by Bismarck of being un-German ; by Gladstone of be- 
ing un-British: in short, she has been steadfastly ar- 
raigned for being too broad. 

No other institution has ever made half so detailed 
a provision for the divergent temperaments of men. 
Her sacraments and rites reckon with every moment in 
and every state of human life. She has created estab- 
lishments for the mystic as well as for the active man, 
which are so carefully individualized that they adjust 
themselves spontaneously to every conceivable type of 
soul. The very Calendar of the Saints is a study in 
the differentiation of the human species. And Catho- 
lic society, which liberated woman from sexual bond- 
age and made of the slave an owner of the land, has 
also done most for the freedom of art. It made of the 
artisan an artist; it raised masters of beauty beyond 
number from the hovels of the poor. The coefficient 
of its action for social emancipation was its eagerness 
to expand the reign of intelligence. Historically it has 
proved the only collective group that could thrive on 
disputes and to it the distraught have come for settle- 



324 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

merit. How many modern minds, egoistic in the face 
of surrounding mediocrity, have turned to Rome for 
solace ! Brunetiere went that road with Coppee, Pat- 
more with Beardsley, Stoddard with Brownson. Men 
whose belligerent individualism was the root of their 
genius have thus come by scores into the most compact 
organization in history. They have discovered that 
a Catholic has a right to do his own thinking as Saint 
Thomas and Dun Scotus did theirs. They have found 
in the principles of belief the pathways to new horizons, 
to new continents of splendour and security. To sum 
up the matter, it may be said that if experience has 
proved anything thoroughly it is that the Catholic 
spirit has never interfered with the fullest liberty de- 
manded by art. 

What a different story this is from that of the sec- 
tarianism which marred the sacred structures of the 
older Christian time, or from that of modern indus- 
trialism which scorns the very name of beauty or its 
servitors ! It is characteristic of our commercial civ- 
ilization to be ignorant of the most simple artistic 
principles and at the same time to regard the whole 
matter with undisguised contempt. The conflict be- 
tween art and the service of material results is irre- 
mediable. Our cities are huge villages of foreigners, 
not the victims of immigration, but the creatures of dis- 
sociation. The things that keep these people together 
are ugly, like the places in which they weave and spin. 
Society has vertigo from incessant turning in a dizzy 
treadmill, and, having been blinded by a delusion of 
progress, does not even realize that it is standing still. 
Art cannot be divorced from serenity of intellect, and 
we have lost that. From the literature of sentimental- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 325 

ism we have gone to the literature of sentimental cyni- 
cism, the ugliest expression of life that has ever been 
offered for worship. 

The Catholic Spirit, however, has continued to in- 
sist upon one thing with all the vigour of its being. 
It has declared that there is a "best" among ideas and 
sentiments, that the premise of art is truth, and that 
truth (which is beauty also) lies in and above what the 
intelligence perceives as existing in the world. The 
senses have their usefulness and the appearances pre- 
sented to them have their allurement, but it is often a 
deceptive allurement. Only a rational treatment of 
the garment of the universe will reveal the reality and 
preserve the beauty of the raiment. And here is where 
the service of religion to art becomes important. By 
reason of its faith in and communication with a world 
that is higher than nature, by reason of the revealed 
truth which it manifests, the religious spirit is suc- 
cessful in keeping the mind on a level higher than mat- 
ter, in rescuing the hand of the artist from the irides- 
cent pools that form in the mud of life. There is, in- 
deed, a terrible beauty for the depraved soul of man 
in the ways of evil, a beauty that seduces the spirit so 
easily cajoled from the beginning by the powers of 
Darkness. 

It need scarcely be added that in practice Chris- 
tianity is the only force which can save art and life 
from the decay of the flesh. "Always and everywhere," 
says Taine the skeptic, "for eighteen hundred years, 
wherever those wings fail or are broken, public and 
private morals are degraded. In Italy during the Re- 
naissance, in England under the Restoration, in France 
under the National Convention, man seemed to become 



326 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as pagan as in the first century ; he became at once as 
he was in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, volup- 
tuous and hard-hearted ; he misused others and himself ; 
brutal or calculating egoism regained ascendancy, 
cruelty and sensuality were openly paraded, and so- 
ciety became the abode of ruffians and the haunt of 
evil." * 

To save art from ruin is one service; to provide it 
with a new world is another. In the wide rooms of the 
spirit, as they are unfolded to the'Catholic vision, there 
are far-reaching vistas which have their influence on 
the reading of life. The symbolism that has distin- 
guished Christian art is simply an attempt to visual- 
ize that portion of the unseen world which is manifest 
to the spirit. Whether we term this effort mystical 
or not, its sponsors vouch bravely for its reality. 
Their discovery has been bought too dearly to be 
termed a delusion, and its results are too worthy to be 
scorned. Anyone who derides it as untrue, or rejects 
it without earnest personal investigation, is emphati- 
cally not a seeker for the "best that has been known 
and thought in the world." He is simply a person with 
prejudices. Practically, then, the Catholic Spirit in 
art is both a regulative and a widening power : it is con- 
servative in its human aspects and radical in its super- 
human aspects. But it never forgets the soul or the 
body, the reality or the symbol. 

Ill 

It is particularly necessary to insist upon the dig- 
nity of art at this time when unusual efforts are being 

1 Quoted by A. Baudrillart, "The Church, the Renaissance, and 
Protestantism." 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 327 

made in English-speaking countries to ignore it. The 
authors who are upheld as masters of contemporary 
writing are almost generally men with very little appre- 
ciation of the soul or of those things in which it is 
vitally interested. Naturalistic motivation in fiction, 
the drama of emotional revolt, impressionistic poetry 
that has been begotten sensuously, are acclaimed with 
surprising enthusiasm. George Moore, D. H. Law- 
rence, Gilbert Cannan, with a hundred lesser individuals, 
are literary gods before whom much incense is uproari- 
ously burned. In America the name before which we 
are bidden to make obeisance is Theodore Dreiser. 
Every adjective adapted to convey the impression of 
virility, of rugged honesty, of unique beauty, is made 
part of the vocabulary of a school of critics that seems 
to have gathered expressly to advertise naturalism. 
The coveted goal of expression appears to be visual- 
ization, and this is achieved principally in regions 
where the human race is "at its damndest," as Pat- 
more would have said. New departments of "science" 
— psycho-analysis and spiritism — are invoked to jus- 
tify the cloudiness of intelligence which seems to have 
conquered the world. The whole of this business has 
been admirably organized to drive away the faintest 
trace of a spiritual idea from the minds of those whose 
course in modern reading has been sufficiently thorough. 
We are not attempting here any defense of squeam- 
ishness nor do we wish to imply that naturalistic art 
is without value. It is probable that the romantic and 
yet fleshly "innocence" in which so many modern fie- 
tionists have steeped their plots has been more baneful 
than plain speaking would have been; certainly it has 
given a distorted view of life, has occasioned a senti- 



328 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

mentalism that wraps the most serious affairs of exist- 
ence in flimsy pink gauze, and has induced puerile rever- 
ies that kill honest thought. Assuredly Saint Fran- 
cis de Sales was a modest man; and yet his discussion 
of sex in the "Introduction to a Devout Life" does not 
shun reality. It was Saint John Chrysostom, the de- 
nouncer of kings and profligates, who thundered 
against prudery as a heresy. And in so far as intense, 
even squalid, realism is concerned, it may very well be 
true that modern industrialism has given abundant 
excuse for the terrible portrait of life which men like 
Balzac and Gissing have provided. 

But it is a different matter to assert that literature 
is privileged to sponsor any principle so long as the 
form in which that principle is couched happens to be 
a la mode. It may be untrue, it may even be the prod- 
uct of a diseased mind. No sepulcher can ever be more 
than a whitened sepulcher; no literary grace can cloak 
the thing that is a lie. Dreary volumes of sordid detail 
will never manage, either, to be art, if the idea which 
they are written to express is some cheap falsity of 
pseudo-science, some hectic justification of brutish in- 
stinct. Every sane man in this world realizes the per- 
verse fascination of the obscene ; and it is the task of 
art, as it is of thought and religion, to transfix the 
demon that is without and within us. The great danger 
for an age which is the prey of advertising lies in the 
fact that the appeal of books which glorify the animal 
in man can be artificially stimulated to give them a 
literary prominence which the common sense of human- 
ity would ordinarily refuse. Subtle philosophers are 
not average readers ; and volumes that are utterly 
gaudy, useless, and vile can be set before the public 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 329 

as "great art" and "epoch-making," can be grounded 
on some mad aesthetic system, and can thus be made to 
aid in the subversion, now so nearly accomplished, of 
the sense of the true and the beautiful. 

The forces which used to oppose paganism have 
weakened considerably. There can be no doubt that as 
Protestantism decays in America, other systems of 
thought based upon some vagrant species of mysticism 
will take its place. The mind of man is hungry and, it 
might be added, his nerves are weak. Centuries of in- 
dividualism have pushed him close to the precipice which 
is license. What does the multitude know today of the 
true and the beautiful? What does it know of God? 
These realities, which formed the pillars of Christen- 
dom, are scarcely more than ruins to a large part of 
our society. But men do cling to the Messianic dream, 
to the Jewish delusion that the king shall rule on earth. 
And one after another social Utopias are being made 
into religions, Utopias which proceed upon the basis 
of some mechanistic interpretation of the world and 
in the hope that out of material welfare peace of heart 
may be born. Demagogue follows fanatic and their 
number is legion; all sense of the solidarity of human 
effort, of human destiny, of human dignity, disappears. 
The poor are either invariably virtuous or the rich are 
above reproach. Man is no longer measured as man, 
but by the riches he possesses or by the industrial func- 
tion which he chances to fulfill. The degradation of 
art is a necessary consequence; for if the vocation of 
the artist is to conserve anything like concern with 
beauty, with aspiration, with ecstasy, it must deal first 
of all with man. 

However much we should like to apply to this or 



330 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

that feverishly acclaimed author the words which Jo- 
seph de Maistre threw at Voltaire, "Paris le couronna: 
Sodome Vent banni" the ghost will not be downed in 
that way. The battle must settle into a contest be- 
tween conceptions of life ; it must be won on the ancient 
alignments of right and wrong. The service of honest 
criticism is, therefore, of the greatest value, and we 
shall try to outline briefly the organized opposition in 
America to the cult of literary sensism. Most impor- 
tant, perhaps, is the humanistic position as defended 
principally by Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More. Pro- 
fessor Babbitt's principles are strikingly evident from 
two able books, "The New Laokoon" and "Rousseau 
and Romanticism" ; and these may be permitted to rep- 
resent the movement to aid which they were written. 
Babbitt's criticism, ably documented and based upon 
very wide reading in many literatures, is concerned 
chiefly with modern romanticism. The substance of his 
doctrine is apparently to be found in this statement: 
"The romantic error has been to make of revery the 
serious substance of life instead of its occasional sol- 
ace ; to set up the things that are below the reason as a 
substitute for those that are above it; in short, to 
turn the nature cult into a religion." He teaches that 
the true humanist is he who mediates between prosaic 
sensibleness and imaginative illusion, who satisfies "the 
standards of poetry without offending the standards of 
prose." 

With so much of his doctrine we are in accord. Un- 
fortunately, however, there is not wanting evidence to 
show that he tends to be what Ruskin would have called 
"a short-sighted Protestant person." One does not 
mean to be ungenerous, but it is clear that Babbitt has 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 331 

not taken into account many things which happened 
between the Aristotle whom he deifies and the Luther 
whom he admires. He does not realize that to the 
reasoned naturalism of the Greeks Christianity added 
the supernaturalism, to proclaim which it had been 
born into this world; he does not see that in Saint 
Thomas and other scholars of the mediaeval time a syn- 
thesis of the two elements was effected that changed 
forever the intellectual complexion of Europe. Of 
course Mr. Babbitt has not stopped with Luther. The 
innate quietism and the ethical preoccupations of his 
spirit are interestingly shown by the fact that he has 
taken refuge in Buddhism. In like manner his aes- 
thetic system is based upon the Greeks and the Renais- 
sance; he cannot understand Christian society because 
he has skipped fifteen centuries. To this twist can be 
traced the manifold narrownesses of a critical system 
to which, in many respects, we may bow with admira- 
tion. Its chief concern is the arraignment of Rousseau, 
who is pilloried as the father of modern ills, but its 
author does not take into account either the fact that 
Rousseau may occasionally have been posing or the no 
less indubitable truth that Luther was guilty of the 
same superlative individualism, the same repudiation 
of intellectual "bondage," and the same reliance on 
states of mind that are divorced from action. In other 
words, he does not find the source of what he knows 
is the trouble with modern literature. But taken all 
in all, his system seems much more solid and helpful 
than, for instance, the idealistic views of Benedetto 
Croce, whose modified Hegelianism, fruitful of novelty, 
is gaining influence among us. That is quite too subtle 
and simple for life. 



332 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Professor Babbitt's humanistic — or classic — prin- 
ciples are ably accepted and defended, with modifica- 
tions, by at least two exceptionally brilliant women, 
Agnes Repplier and Katherine Fullerton Gerould. 
Their writing has poise, wit, and acid, and there are 
few men amongst us who could safely risk a passage 
with either. But both are frankly aristocratic, dis- 
dainful of the vulgarity of the horde, and intent upon 
conserving the culture of the chosen few : Mrs. Gerould 
says bluntly, "I am cynical enough to believe that, if 
a generation feels like stepping down, it will do so." * 
And she seems quite right. How impossible it is 
either to stem the current of a popular movement or 
to inaugurate a new one by the simple expedient of 
creating a doctrine, especially a high-brow doctrine! 
Babbitt, as a matter of fact, has generally been either 
derided or ignored. The people who read Gautier will 
not accept his authority and those who do not are 
scarcely inclined to attribute to literary criticism the 
lofty position claimed for it in "Rousseau and Roman- 
ticism." The only influence that can elevate the trend 
of literature is a correct and generally accepted stand- 
ard of life, a collective grasp of the sources from which 
art springs. More individualism is not calculated to 
remedy the excessive concern with the Ego which has 
unbalanced modern thought. And it is instructive to 
note in this connection exactly what has happened in 
France where the conflict has raged fiercest, where, as 
Arnold has affirmed, "the people are most alive," and 
where in spite of the tumult, Catholic tradition is still 
influential. 

The nineteenth century opened, indeed, with the ro- 

1 "The Movies," Atlantic Monthly, July, 1921. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOUC SPIRIT 333 

mantic revival of Chateaubriand, but its basis was still 
the intellectual position that had antedated the Revo- 
lution. Rousseau who dreamed of a beatific return to 
nature, and Voltaire who scorned with the full bitter- 
ness of an unbeliever the institutions which had upheld 
society, had disturbed the minds of modern men too 
violently for the acceptance of a moderate philosophy. 
The author of "Emile" had professed to believe that 
thought is criminal; his disciples simply did not think. 
Delicacy of sense-perception, satiety of sense-experi- 
ence, were set up as the guiding principles in art. 
"Whatever is realized is right," said Oscar Wilde, who 
was an excellent pupil, though the English jailed him 
for being in earnest. Literature was divorced from in- 
telligence, from morals, from every faculty of man ex- 
cept his animal instincts and his abnormalities. For 
the first time, it was maintained, the artist was entirely 
free; he existed for no other purpose than to dream, 
"beautifully" perhaps, but differently at all costs. 

And yet literature had never been so sternly bound 
by fantastic and impossible theories. With Zola the 
art of fiction became an experiment in the discovery of 
laws that (supposedly) govern humanity with scientific 
rigidity; his books are enormous wastes across which 
move primitive men, characters formed and driven ac- 
cording to the iron rules of heredity, environment, and 
the necessities of existence. For all his wealth of de- 
tail, he was interested in large, crude theses and not in 
facts. Whenever the actual world ran counter to his 
hypothesis, he denied the existence of the world. But 
Zola was not an anomaly. He had learned his man- 
ner in the company of George Sand, whose theories were 
ample, vague, often viciously sentimental; of Victor 



334 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Hugo, who preached long but engaging sermons in the 
interests of humanitarianism ; of Gautier, for whom 
life was a piquant series of adventures — or experiments 
— in sex; and of Flaubert and the Goncourts who 
sought the word that would conjure up a musty odour 
for an inordinate sensibility. Not one of all these but 
was generously gifted, all had talent, and all were last- 
ing and vivid demonstrations of the truth that litera- 
ture cannot be divorced from reality and a sound phi- 
losophy of the world. 

This was an era, too, of skeptic speculation, when 
the already unsettled souls of men were further shaken 
by the phrases of Saint-Simon, by the subtle irreligion 
of Renan, and by the dark Positivism of Taine. The 
old, solid traditions of Christian France were attacked 
by the intelligence just as they had been undermined 
by the romantic appeal to the emotions. It seemed 
true, indeed, that modern life had pitilessly made im- 
possible the dogmas of the past. Well might Augustin 
Cochin cry out, "Seigneur, il est bien temps de nous 
woir." French artistic endeavour slowly poisoned it- 
self with sensism. "Present French society," wrote 
Julien Benda a few years ago, "demands of works of 
art that they should arouse emotion and stimulate 
sensation ; it does not any longer seek to reach through 
them any sort of intellectual pleasure." * Emile Cler- 
mont observed clearly that moderns ask of art the in- 
toxication which the Greeks sought from wine or the 
celebration of their mysteries. 

It cannot be denied that this attitude persists to a 
considerable extent today. The emotional derange- 
ment of the French mind is still great, but common 

1 "Belphegor," by Julien 3enda. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 335 

sense and tradition have gained a victory. It began 
with the conversion of Huysmans, the "eye" of French 
naturalism; with the return of Baudelaire the nostol- 
giac and Coppee the humanitarian; with the sudden 
arousal of interest in Joseph de Maistre and Ernest 
Hello. The classic literature of France, with its admir- 
able depth and serenity, had after all not lost its in- 
fluence — the influence of Pascal, Racine, Bossuet. 
More and more forcefully criticism insisted upon the 
norm of reason, and later on the norm of faith. Brune- 
tiere, Lemaitre, Bremond, Giraud, Doumic, Wyzewa, 
Strowski — in every instance the intellect was rounded 
out by religion, the scientific man learned credence. 
The tide of battle that had been desperate, turned. 

Gazing upon modern France from across the ruins of 
four years, one beholds a civilization that has been 
shaken to the core, but the ancient traditions of which 
have stood firm. We intend no such thing as a gen- 
eralization or classification of so mobile and differen- 
tiated a world as French letters. Nevertheless, it seems 
correct to say that two strong forces are now plainly 
in evidence: a concern with the morals of life and an 
interest in the ideal. The novels of Paul B our get, 
Maurice Barres, Rene Bazin, Henri Bordeaux, and of 
younger artists like Francois Mauriac, Alexandre Ar- 
noux, and Edmond Jaloux, are resolute in presenting 
the spiritual ideas sternly taught by life; strong 
French women like Colette Yver and Leontine Zanta 
are stripping feminism of emotional excess ; and a gal- 
lant host of poets like Paul Claudel, Francis Jammes, 
Henri Gheon, and Maurice Brillant carry to dizzy 
heights the splendour of Christian song. And, lost in 
the mists of the war, how many goodly names there 



336 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

are! Charles Peguy, Ernest Psichari, Paul Drouot, 
and Emile Clermont, and older men like Joseph Lotte 
and the Count de Mun. With these stand a multitude 
of shining names in every department of literature — 
history, philosophy, criticism, journalism. To press 
the matter would make of this essay a catalogue. 

We do not entertain the delusion that paganism has 
been banished from France. It does not even fear ex- 
ile. But the disdain with which the generation of Zola 
looked upon ideas that expressed confidence in the 
reality of the unseen is no longer in vogue. Instead, 
the art of Zola himself has been so thoroughly repudi- 
ated that the Goncourt prize for realistic literature 
went in 1920 to Ernest Perochon for "Nene," a story 
which the master of the naturalists would have consid- 
ered dubious, to say the least. The same change is 
noticeable in many other arts. "There has not been," 
says Maurice Denis, "for a long time an epoch more 
passionately devoted to sacred art than our own." * 
The very spokesmen of the Church have recovered the 
majesty and serenity of the style of Bossuet. We are 
not interested here, however, in setting forth the vic- 
tories of the Church: we wish merely to point out the 
success of Christian, of moral and idealistic art. It 
must be remembered always that, as Mr. Howells once 
said, Catholicism is the natural form of religion in 
France. And the success which the expression of the 
religious spirit has achieved there is also a succession ; 
it has been the reborn voice of a France reborn, with 
her heroic breast to the enemy and her shield in front 
of the sanctuary of the world. 

1 "Theories," by Maurice Denis, Paris. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 337 



IV 

Enough has been said to indicate not only that there 
is a place for standards in art, but that these have 
been contested with varying success by the leading 
schools of the past century. No man can write with- 
out a philosophy, because no man can exist without a 
philosophy ; the very technique of an artist may be de- 
pendent upon his view of miracles. Now the Catholic 
standard in art is traditional, or rather the Catholic 
tradition is a standard. We are humanists in the sense 
that we do not believe that such and such a professor 
or critic has been born to give the world its first glimpse 
of truth and beauty. We are sufficiently conservative 
to agree with Pascal that "all the good rules have 
been laid down, and it remains necessary only to put 
them into practice"; the visions which humanity has 
entertained in its highest moods will probably not, we 
think, be improved upon by some small-chested dilet- 
tante who knows Baudelaire by rote, no matter how 
"young" he may be. But the Catholic spirit is above 
all radical: it has roots which it believes are vital, it 
will not separate art either from life to-day or from 
life in the past. One need not state here that the ar- 
tistic era to which the Catholic mind naturally and 
joyfully reverts is that of the Middle Ages. This im- 
plies reverence for classical culture as a matter of 
course, for whatever elements of pagan grandeur were 
known to the mediaeval artist or thinker became vigor- 
ous germs, seeds that burst open under the light of a 
newly risen sun. 



338 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The Middle Ages were distinguished from other pe- 
riods of history by many things, but by nothing more 
clearly than the universal prevalence of the artistic 
mood. "That the end of life is not action," says Wal- 
ter Pater, "but contemplation — being as distinct from 
doing — a certain disposition of the mind: is in some 
shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. 
In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at 
all, you touch this Principle, in a measure; these, by 
their very sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere 
joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art is to 
make of life a thing in which means and end are identi- 
fied; to encourage such treatment, the true moral sig- 
nificance of art and poetry." The identification of 
means and end, as suggested by Pater, was achieved 
with happy results for art in the mediaeval synthesis. 
Then, if ever, nature and human life were viewed as 
inseparable from the Source of truth and beauty; the 
smallest creature that hid from the scrutiny of man 
reflected the splendour of the Creator. Action became 
contemplation, and the slightest utensil as well as the 
most ordinary service were endowed with a grace, a 
comeliness, which our modern world cannot quite under- 
stand. Art was indeed inspired utility, uniting in its 
manifold forms a rigid reasonableness with exuberant 
fancy. 1 

For the only time in the history of mankind the col- 
lective soul, which is just as real and energetic as the 
individual spirit, functioned harmoniously. It moved 
staunchly forward along a path of reason that seldom 
wandered astray from the actual into regions of sub- 
jective idealism, or sank to the marshlands of sense. 

1 Cf. Chap. VIII on Francis Thompson. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOUC SPIRIT 339 

With an admirable persistence the mediaeval mind, 
though in the end it did expend itself in useless subtlety, 
continued for a long period of time on the broad level 
where harmonious cooperation of minds is possible. 
There Saint Thomas developed the doctrine of Aris- 
totle, while others expounded with supreme originality 
and concreteness the teachings of Plato. There the 
science of building, the science of poetry, and the sci- 
ence of music were envested with a perfect vitality that 
is still the wonder of the world. Never did the din of 
argument rise higher, and never either was the voice of 
reason more equitable and discerning. The collective 
mind was guided in its aspirations by the light of 
Christ, by a firm and intuitive faith which cast its radi- 
ance over the pathway of reason and made the footing 
easy. No doubt mediaeval men were proud, irascible, 
lustful even, with violence, but they were always men 
who knew that the robes of their destiny were about 
them. 

More interesting even than this activity of the intel- 
lect among the chosen few, was that great popular ex- 
periment of the Middle Ages, the spiritualization of 
Democracy. The common man really and truly be- 
came a man, free in the disposition of his lot, the un- 
disputed possessor of rights which society might violate 
but which it must recognize as inalienable. It was this 
man who set into movement the cooperative economic 
bodies known as the guilds; who undertook the expedi- 
tions of mystic conquest called the Crusades; whose 
menial tasks were so illumined by the glory of his 
spiritual inheritance that they became beautiful almost 
of necessity; who made of his handiwork a human fir- 
mament in which there are set a countless multitude of 



340 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

stars. The popular voice was not, as a rule, literary 
— that would have demanded writing — but it was more. 
It was artistic. A wealth of saints' legends and of 
fairy tales; the universal prevalence of a somewhat 
uncouth but vigorous and thoughtful drama ; the kindly 
satire which we moderns can only repeat and sharpen ; 
the breath of poetry which was shaken like spikenard 
over the passing throng: all this was alive with the 
voice of the people, who were creative because they 
were free and blessed with unity, because the earth 
upon which they walked was good. 

Necessarily the cooperative effort of the Middle 
Ages was based on discipline, but it was as far as pos- 
sible removed from coercion. Europe, which often 
seems to have been a riot of individual notions, was 
cast into a mould that was nothing less than a state of 
mind. The great motive power of Christendom was a 
full recognition of the freedom of the will and of indi- 
vidual responsibility, based upon belief in personal 
immortality. The sanctions of society were less than 
nothing on paper, but written upon the human heart 
they were immutable, irrefragable. Here was a law 
which none could escape, but which, properly under- 
stood, would become a burden of delight. 

We are fully conscious of having said very little 
about the infirmities of the time. It was not paradise, 
and it did hear the voice of woe. Nobody need over- 
look the fact that there were no bathtubs and no auto- 
mobiles, no newspapers or congressmen. But the men 
of the Middle Ages proved the human success of their 
social life by creating one mighty and unforgettable 
monument to happiness — laughter. The hale mirth 
of Christian Europe broke from the lips of the multi- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 341 

tude. It looked serenely from the lofty pinnacles of 
the cathedral, it was discernible on every gate in Chris- 
tendom. It was lusty in the throats of singers and 
actors, it was sharp in the derision of the street-seer. 
It was the blissful virtue that Brother Juniper caught 
from his superior, and it was the legacy of Sir Thomas 
More. Nothing ever appeared so spontaneously or 
unexpectedly. In comparison with the laughter of 
Christendom, Aristophanes and Mark Twain alike are 
savage. Here was no deadly acid, but instead salt, 
which saved the popular spirit from excess of fervour 
and kept it wholesome even while it itself was the prod- 
uct of wholesomeness. The civilization of the Middle 
Ages needs no further defense. 

Thus a healthy communal philosophy that could not 
conceive of existence as anything but a noble and conse- 
quently beautiful enterprise constructed a society that 
expressed itself fully, consciously, artistically. Now 
literature is of necessity more individual than the 
rest of the arts; it is, in fact, always a blend of the 
subjective and the objective, of the mind and the world. 
Nobody ever proved this better than Flaubert, who 
denied it. Nevertheless, to revert once more to the 
keen statement of Matthew Arnold, the gift of literary 
genius "lies in the faculty of being happily inspired 
by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere." 
Art is always, secondarily at least, the product of an 
artistic society. The masters of mediaeval beauty are 
often nameless because they were absorbed in the mob 
— the mob that rose from the soil of France to build 
the miracle shrines of Chartres and Amiens ; the mob 
that made every city from Bruges to Saragossa an im- 
age of the New Jerusalem ; the mob out of which came 



342 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

living, immortal poems like Saint Jeanne d'Arc and 
Godfrey de Bouillon. 

It is characteristic of the leaders of "those incom- 
parable times, when an unsophisticated people had 
been formed in Beauty without themselves being aware 
of it," as Jacques Maritain says, 1 that they should have 
summed up the best energy of the world around them. 
We shall name as typical of the literary standards of 
the time three men, one of whom was, indeed, not very 
literary, but whose influence on literature, particularly 
in our own time, has been very great. Saint Francis of 
Assisi won over life because he loved it. There was in 
his thought no worship of the light within, but in- 
stead a wholehearted surrender to the Light Who is 
above, Whose reflection is upon all things. Francis 
smiled at learning, but sought truth and found that 
it was beautiful. His teaching was done by means of 
symbols, the common alphabet of all poets, and his 
religion got expression through them also. It was the 
secret of his success that he should have come close 
to simple things by renouncing them, that the Wolf 
of Gubbio walked by his side, tamed by an instinctive 
perception of unselfish brotherhood. The multitude 
that followed him lovingly did so because he had been 
called to represent, like some radiant metaphor, the 
things which they saw were good. He was the incar- 
nation of the common spiritual quest of the time. Art 
could seek no better master, for art is not concerned 
with atoms or microbes, but with the soul that inspires 
the least of things with a memorable power. No spir- 
itual interest of our own time is more hopeful than the 
growing love for the Franciscan mood. 

1 "Art et Scholastique," Paris, Librarie de Fart Catholique. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 343 

Francis was a saint, but the greatest mediaeval 
writer, the keystone of literature, is Dante Alighieri. 
One may read the "Divina Commedia" for its revela- 
tion of the poet's mind and heart, for its religious fer- 
vour and theological science, or for its allegorical 
wealth. All three views have their value, as one may 
learn from respectively Ozanam, Moore, and Croce. The 
poem is the perfect poetic wedding of matter and form, 
of truth and beauty, of mankind and its aspirations to 
the knowledge of God. And yet Dante is not a solitary 
figure looming in solitary stateliness from the wastes 
of a lowly age. How much he owed to the poets who 
went before him, to the philosophers like Saint Thomas 
at whose feet he sat, and to the saints of the Church is 
not easy to determine, but assuredly he owed much. 
He was not afraid either to make his poem a realistic 
picture of society, or to incorporate into it the best 
that had been known and thought by that society. 
Dante wished also to do things ; he did not seek to 
divorce the practical from the speculative, the will from 
the intelligence. Feeling that the life of man is a seri- 
ous business, he took it sternly ; and there is no realism 
that is darker than the terrible fires of the Inferno. 
But the nature of his genius made him also a contempla- 
tive and his convictions were Catholic, so that the Pur- 
gatorio, rich with brooding over the Ideal, with con- 
sciousness of man's painful advance to happiness, is a 
better poem than, as well as a complement to, the phi- 
losophy of the Inferno. Dante the mystic is at home 
also in the inaccessible regions of heaven, and like all 
true mystics he does not disdain the minute details of 
the finite world. The Ptolemaic astronomy in the 
Paradiso is not a blemish but a demonstration of the 



344 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

poet's constant concern with the real world. He knew 
that heaven would stand when the last star had fallen ; 
but he realized as well that the only highway thither 
for the mortal poet leads athwart the stars. Nor was 
he guilty of the modern romantic confusion of revery 
with contemplation; he knew that the watches of the 
spirit are kindled by desire. And that impulse, that 
longing, for the goal of God was the profound motive 
of mediaeval society, which viewed the Saviour not only 
with Saint Francis as a child in the manger, but also 
with Dante as the King whose brow is a throne of 
thorns. 

What the art of the Middle Ages gained and lost 
by the infusion of humanism may be learned from a 
study of Shakespeare, who marks the passing of that 
art and also represents most successfully the nature 
of the English genius. He was the descendant of 
Chaucer as well as of the Renaissance, and Chaucer 
had none of the Latin elan or ecstasy, but instead the 
fresh kindliness of another race. His world was more 
earthly because his people were less abstract, more 
dramatic; and the spiritual concern of his poems lay 
with the forces that modify character in ordinary life. 
He gave body to the spirit and put its principles into 
action. That is the genius of the English race. That 
is what Shakespeare, too, has done, in a series of moral 
discourses which are almost as rigorous as the sermons 
of Saint Jerome. His drama is great, solid, marvel- 
ously beautiful, but it is also composite. The materials 
came from other artists, the philosophy is that which 
the time accepted. Shakespeare may have known 
comparatively little of the classics, but he stood at the 
center of life — a vigorous, all-seeing artist, whose man- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 345 

liness conquered both pit and gallery. This masculine 
character of his thought and diction ought never to be 
lost sight of ; men are needed to speak his lines, no mat- 
ter whether they storm or are tender. On the other 
hand, all that is needed for the male roles in decadent 
drama is a "perfect thirty-six." 

The standards which underlay, and to some ex- 
tent were responsible for, the creative power of medi- 
aeval art were vitality, a recognition of social solidarity, 
and a firm grasp of the things of the spirit. The mas- 
ters of that time were not egoists; they worked for, 
were members of, a free society which would not have 
understood a pose of effeminate disdain. But neither 
were they formalists, restrained from spontaneity by 
gratuitous conventions. The character of Shakespeare 
is merged in the general creative exuberance of the time, 
as the character of the sculptor who wrought the mir- 
acle transept of Reims is merged. Nothing that the 
Christian past has to tell us is more important than 
that art at its best is a collective endeavour; that 
sense, that understanding, is still strong at the end of 
the Middle Ages with Rabelais in France and Cervantes 
in Spain. These men would have scorned anything but 
fellowship with their neighbours, and a tower of ivory 
would have seemed to them suitable only for a lady's 
boudoir. Let us be firmly assured that we shall have 
no great art until that spirit of collective endeavour is 
restored, until beauty is made to rise spontaneously 
from a free society in which the fundamental principles 
of life are agreed upon. For beauty cannot be distilled 
in secret or spun from the sensibilities of the shirker; 
it is the common delight of men that springs into being 
in the common light of day. 



346 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



How, then, modern life being what it is, can the 
Catholic Spirit in art become effective? It is quite true 
that it cannot exercise its power to the fullest extent. 
The connection between us and the mediaeval tradition 
has been broken, and we could not go back if we would. 
The reasonable man everywhere is a lover of his time. 
He may see its manysided error, its engulfing material- 
ism, the weakness and the sin of its institutional life; he 
may even believe that the whole structure of modern 
civilization is built upon injustice, that it cannot create 
beauty because it was conceived in ugliness. But he 
will not, unless he is blind, overlook the patient striv- 
ing for light and loveliness of which our world is full. 
Living in an age that has been shaped ruthlessly by 
war, all of us have witnessed the surging idealism, the 
courage, of the multitude, and have seen, too, their 
bitter disillusionment in the outcome of the struggle. 
It is not so far from earth to Sirius as it is from Peguy 
and even Brooke to cynical books on the Peace Confer- 
ence. For better or for worse, our world has dreamed 
of a crusade; you cannot satisfy it with a protective 
tariff. 

Now the great value of the Catholic Spirit under 
present circumstances lies in its exact balancing of con- 
servative and radical tendencies. It has saved the best 
that was known and thought in the past and it has re- 
fused to accept the results of a break with that past. 
Nowhere else is there a power which so bridges the dif- 
ference between us and our forefathers. Unfortunately, 
the Catholic Spirit is not always alive and active. Un- 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 347 

fortunately it, too, has been isolated in practice from 
the large hopes that once caused the dawn to stand over 
the Western world. Here in America we have as yet 
failed to understand fully the bonds which link us to 
the tradition of Christendom: the memories which 
Columbus strove to carry to the ends of the earth, 
memories of the beauty of a society that still rested 
secure under the dominion of the Fisherman's ring 
when men first began to wonder whether there might be 
a continent to the westward sea. For this we are not 
quite to blame. During several centuries the Church 
has been living in a state of siege, has heard the din 
of a tumultuous attack upon her ancient walls. Only 
today when the opposing forces have been weakened 
by the disintegration of their morale, when the giant 
dream of modern society has been shattered, has she, 
too, been liberated. 

But the freedom of the Catholic Spirit has been re- 
stored in the midst of darkness. Shall we venture to 
dream of beauty and peace, of holiness and ecstasy, 
while the cauldron seethes? Often enough, indeed, one 
is inclined to accept the opinion that the disintegra- 
tion of intelligence must proceed further; that only 
the ignominy of having been driven to its knees will 
arouse the multitude to fury with the base ideals that 
it has adored. Be that as it may, the truths and the 
energy of Christendom are eternal, as is its mastery of 
the heart. And nothing has been more perennially 
characteristic of the missionary work of the Catholic 
Spirit than the recognition of the sacred appeal of 
art. The beauty inspired by Greece was national, even 
local, but the creative power of Christendom denied the 
existence of frontiers. Wherever the Church set her 



348 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

foot, whether upon the coast of England or in the mag- 
nificent city of Constantine, the spirit sought ex- 
pression in matter. Whatever the people into whose 
midst she came might have been, they grew into artists. 
To use a homely metaphor, she was the great gong that 
stirred the rhythm of the music of the world. 

If, then, the Catholic Spirit in America can com- 
prehend the cohesiveness of its traditions, can rise to 
the appreciation of its inheritance, artistic expression 
is almost certain to follow. Surely it is time for us to 
understand that life is not all utility or even all mo- 
rality ; that in the ordered union of matter and form is 
written the very alphabet of God. Our final task here, 
therefore, shall be to enumerate a few things which the 
circumstances of our environment would seem to sug- 
gest earnestly. The Catholic literature which we have 
surveyed has been written with full consciousness of 
the miracle of Christendom, but it has been the work of 
a comparative handful of men who have felt the con- 
stant pressure of isolation and have been forced to 
overlook the general indifference of their public. The 
attitude of that public has even in some measure been 
responsible for the limitations which our letters show. 

In the first place, have we been interested in reality, 
which means life taken as life and not under the form 
of a palliative, highly edifying in some ways, but on 
the whole viciously untrue ? It is indisputable that the 
fundamental quality of art must be sincerity, which 
does not mean realistic banality but does most em- 
phatically mean reality. The dilettantism, the anaemia, 
so evident in our letters, will make no headway against 
the spirit of our time, which is based on business. The 
commercial mind may be dubious in its ethics, but it is 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 349 

sound in its estimate of the actual state of affairs. It 
examines conditions to find out what they really are, 
it knows the field and bases none of its calculations 
upon sugary illusion. Moreover, it prosecutes its pur- 
pose with overwhelming energy, with the full verve of 
the intellect. We know that it is shortsighted and 
materialistic, that it does not deal with or understand 
the whole man. But that is not its affair. That is 
the raison d'etre of literature. And until the art of 
writing becomes once more a masculine art, strong, 
courageous, thoroughly alive, it will not learn to speak 
the words for which this generation is waiting. 

Just as soon as literature becomes more than a 
venal proffering of mental stick-candy, it will regain 
its position among the forces that mould men. This 
elevation will not be accomplished by the school of 
ultra-realism, of pessimistic individualism, now gain- 
ing vogue. That is no more honest than the hyper- 
sentimentalism against which we have protested. The 
great books that reveal truth believe in facts, but they 
are essentially not catalogs bound in gloom. "Color," 
said Ingres, "is the animal part of art." It is the 
stroke that reveals the master, and not the paintpots 
of verbal imagery or "statistics" with which he may 
cover his work. For interpretation, which is the goal 
of the creative spirit, is the product of the artist's 
intelligence and will, not merely of his eyes. It will 
be coloured, indeed, by his temperament and his state 
of mind; it may legitimately be as pessimistic as Pas- 
cal, as optimistic as Dickens. But it cannot honestly 
be as pink as "Pollyana" or as dirty as "Esther 
Waters." After all, Meredith has made the point 
here: "Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so 



350 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; 
and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren 
aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, 
fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive that 
we are coming to philosophy and the stride towards it 
will be a giant's — a century a day. And imagine the 
celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the 
place of sham ; real flesh ; a soul born active, wind- 
beaten, but ascending." * 

And that philosophy cannot any longer be effective 
if marred by an excessive individualism. "Never," 
says Palacio Valdes, "have men of letters been so much 
preoccupied with originality as at present and never 
have they been less original than at present." 2 We 
simply cannot afford to ignore the lessons that have 
been taught by the civilizations of the past, or to 
believe that the imagination of a single man can over- 
shadow the collective experience of the race. Again, 
if our art is not to be a vain and fruitless endeavour, 
it must take into account the ordinary lives of men, 
it must deal with the problems, the joys, and the sor- 
rows of the universal mood. Its dealing must be sober, 
honest, beautiful. 

The literature of the Catholic Spirit can safely trust 
the wings of its tradition. Let there be a deepening 
concern with the things of the spirit in the light of rea- 
son; convince men once more of the truth of the king- 
dom of God, teach them the beauty and responsibility 
of their human inheritance, make them feel the mag- 
nificence of the divine adventure into which they are 
born. The renewal of the face of the earth must begin 

1 Preface to "Diana of the Crossways." 

2 Address to the Spanish Academy, 1921. 



LITERATURE AND VISTAS OF THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT 351 

with the soul of man. When the point of view of the 
multitude has been weaned from the glitter that dis- 
tracts it, when the hale solidity of its spiritual heritage 
has been understood again, our task shall have been 
done. Until then we shall labour in the light of the 
past, strong with the strength of our fathers, in the 
gilded harness of undying kings. 

BOOK NOTE 

The literature on the subject considered in this chapter is, of 
course, very extensive. For the mediaeval background see espe- 
cially: "L'Art religieux en France au XHIme siecle," by ISmile 
Male; "The Mediaeval Mind," by H. O. Taylor; "Chartres and 
Saint Michel," by Henry Adams; "The Substance of Gothic Art," 
by Ralph A. Cram; "Mores Catholici," by Kenelm Digby; and the 
standard works on mediaeval literature, such as those by P. de 
Julleville, Gaston Paris, Karl Kantzius, L. Cledat, etc. In addi- 
tion, consult "Dante" and "The Franciscan Poets," by Frederick 
Ozanam, and "Thomas v. Aquin," by M. Grabman. The contro- 
versy on literary standards may be studied in: "L'Art et Scho- 
lastique," by J. Maritain; "Theories," by Maurice Denis; "Le 
Romantisme Francais," by P. Lasserre, and the same author's 
later "Chapelles Litteraires" ; "The New Laokoon" and "Rousseau 
and Romanticism," by Irving Babbitt; "The Drift of Romanti- 
cism," by P. E. More; "On Contemporary Literature," by S. P. 
Sherman; "The vEsthetic as Science of Expression," by Benedetto 
Croce; "Belphegor," by Julien Benda; "Standards," by Professor 
Brownell; "Beyond Life," by J. B. Cabell; "Prejudices," by H. L. 
Mencken; "Essays," by Alice Meynell; "Les Maitres de PHeure," 
by Victor Giraud. Among older books see: "Lectures on Art," 
by John Ruskin; "Principle in Art," by C. Patmore; "Essays," by 
Matthew Arnold; "Heretics" and "Orthodoxy," by G. K. Chester- 
ton; "Le Roman Naturaliste," by F. Brunetiere; "Le Disciple," 
by Paul B our get, and the same author's introduction to "Le 
Demon de Midi"; "L'Homme," by E. Hello; and, of course, Sainte- 
Beuve. Among a host of German books on the subject, it may be 
interesting to see in this connection, "Die Romantik," by Ricarda 
Huch; "Die Wiedergeburt der Dichtung," by Karl Muth; and a 
criticism, by Dr. Max Ettlinger, of Deutinger's teaching. 



ADDENDA 

A MISCELLANY OF DEFENDERS 

IT is manifestly impossible to give, within the limits 
of a single book, anything like adequate treatment 
of the ramifications of a great movement. To 
the famous men who have been recalled, there might be 
added dozens of others whose work has been fruitful, 
generous, and amiable. But we shall have to content 
ourselves here with the briefest possible mention of a 
score or two of writers whose efforts in behalf of the 
Catholic Spirit have been distinctly worth while. Some 
of these have attained considerable fame, and others 
are not so well known; but surely all of them have 
found readers who will not indifferently permit their 
names to die. 

Modern Catholic poetry, for example, cannot spare 
the name of Mrs. Hamilton King, one of the most in- 
teresting accessions to the Church from among the 
verse-writers of England. She was like Mrs. Brown- 
ing both in feebleness of body and in a passionate con- 
cern with the national politics of Italy ; but her poems 
largely antedate her relation with the Catholic Spirit. 
"The Disciples" is eager verse written out of a fond- 
ness for the aspirations of Mazzini, but it has mood- 
quality as well. "The Ballad of the Midnight Sun" is 
saga-like in its narrative skill and brusque colour of 
scene. Mrs. King's technique is always quite uncon- 

352 



A MISCELLANY OF DEFENDERS 353 

ventional but seldom eccentric, and her devotional 
poems have flavour as well as piety. This cannot be 
said so truly of the verse of Augusta T. Drane, or of 
the poems of Armael and Violet O'Connor, though 
these do not lack fervour and some insight. Father 
E. Garesche, S. J., is an American religious poet of 
ability: if there is something too formal about his 
stanzas, they do possess on the other hand a suggestive- 
ness that is the result of delicate spiritual feeling. 

In fiction one does not like to overlook the present- 
day novels of Isabel Clark and Edward Downey. The 
work of Miss Clark is marred to some extent by senti- 
mentalism and bad technique, but such stories as "By 
the Blue River" are not to be scorned. Mr. Downey 
is memorable chiefly for "The House of Tears," al- 
though much of his other work is good and enjoyable. 
"The Golden Rose," a novel by Mrs. Hugh Fraser, is 
altogether admirable; its author is also a notable 
writer of memoirs, "A Diplomat's Wife in Many 
Lands," for instance. No other American Catholic 
teller of short stories has the dramatic power or the 
psychological finesse of Mary Synon, whose tales of 
French Canadian life are particularly well done. 

We did not include in our survey of fiction one 
novelist who belonged to the "old school" and another 
who is quite new and deserving of the friendliest atten- 
tion. Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald's once famous novel, 
"A Simple Story," is no longer much read, but it seems 
to have impressed, by a candid realism and a genuine 
vigour, the great story-tellers of its time and to have 
inspired "Jane Eyre." Mrs. Inchbald was an actress 
of charming personality and deep faith, whose own 
life was a romance. Our newest novelist is that very 



354 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN , MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

promising gentleman, Ernest Oldmeadow. Being a 
converted Non-conformist minister, he bids his stories 
deal with the Faith as a goal to be struggled for, but 
keeps them very human and lovable by means of honest 
humour. "Antonio," "The Hare," "Coggin," Mr. Old- 
meadow's published works, reveal great ability in char- 
acterization and mastery of atmosphere. Coggin, who 
appears in the book bearing his name and in "The 
Hare," a sequel, is expected to show up once more 
in the third volume of a trilogy. His creator, endowed 
with a gift for romance and a shrewd interest in the 
Latin civilization of Portugal, bears a certain sem- 
blance to Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Fiction readers 
must take hopeful note of him and, meanwhile, be en- 
tertained. 

It is after all only a step from the art of fiction 
to the art of narrating the truth, and Sir William But- 
ler, traveler and raconteur, has a bright novelist's 
entire charm. Such books as "The Wild North Land," 
"The Great Lone Land," and "Far Out" remain among 
the most picturesque and compelling volumes of travel. 
Sir William was Irish and witty, but knew the worth 
of a sonorous and entrancing English style. His pic- 
tures of life in the Canadian Northwest are particu- 
larly fascinating. The "Autobiography," too, will 
continue to win delighted readers. A long and excep- 
tionally active life led him into many places, but he 
remained to the end a man of hearty honour. 

Sir William Butler was a public figure; there are 
other men who — may the pun be forgiven! — figure as 
publicists. In none of these was logic, clarity of state- 
ment, and sincere concern with social issues more evi- 
dent than in Cecil Chesterton (1879-1916). He lacked 



A MISCELLANY OF DEFENDERS 355 

the poetic genius, the verve of insight and expression, 
which have made his brother a man for the world to 
note; but he was, perhaps, a better journalist, a more 
rigid thinker, and he accepted the Catholic tradition 
in its entirety. None of his books may prove of last- 
ing value— "A History of the United States," "The 
Party System," "The Prussian Hath Said in His 
Heart" — but they have done good and have shown 
forth a memorable man. 

Cecil Chesterton was a democrat who often found 
himself at odds with another distinguished Catholic 
writer on social matters, William Samuel Lilly (1840- 
1920). Mr. Lilly was conservative in the sense that 
he was a close, almost too close, student of Aristotle, 
and believed firmly in the value of an aristocracy. His 
books, "A Century of Revolution," "Idola Fori," "The 
Great Enigma," and "Renaissance Types," are dis- 
tinguished by sincerity of conviction, eloquence, and 
diligent scholarship. It is not out of place to rank 
with him a man who is not a Catholic but who has de- 
fended certain Catholic views with talent and industry, 
W. H. Mallock. "Is Life Worth Living?" was a chal- 
lenge alike to sensists and positivists that gained the 
approval of a large public. "The New Republic," a 
famous satire, taught much the same lesson by insinua- 
tion. In other books, notably "Religion as a Credible 
Doctrine" and "Social Reform," he has shown an inti- 
mate acquaintance with the most diverse forms of mod- 
ern thought. Mr. Mallock is likewise a successful 
novelist and poet. 

No form of literature has a wider appeal to the dis- 
cerning public of today than the whimsical, personal 
essay. We recall with great pleasure the work of 



356 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Thomas Longueville, a convert journalist, most of 
whose books were published under the pseudonym, "The 
Prig." "The Life of a Prig" and "How to Make a 
Saint" are delightful satires that are never mordant 
and are very nearly as urbane as the best of Charles 
Lamb. Mr. Longueville was also the author of a 
"Life of Sir Kenelm Digby." Another name that one 
loves to remember is that of an American, Charles 
Bullard Fairbanks (1827-1859), who signed himself, 
"Aguecheek." His principal work, "Memorials of the 
Blessed," breathes the perfume of the past and is at 
the same time the monument of an exceptionally lov- 
able personality. 

One ought not to conclude a consideration of the 
work of the Catholic Spirit without giving some atten- 
tion to the writers whose concern has lain primarily 
with scholarship. Philosophy and the social sciences 
have profited much from a clear restatement of Catho- 
lic principles. "The Metaphysics of the Schools," by 
the learned Jesuit, Father Harper, is a notable work. 
To this must be added such well-known books as 
Cronin's "Ethics," Maher's "Psychology," Coffey's 
"Ontology," Zahm's "Evolution and Dogma," and 
Ryan's "Distributive Justice." Nor is the work of 
such able Jesuits as Father Rickaby, Father Slater, 
and Father Thurston at all negligible. It has been 
thought best to make but a cursory mention here of 
Father George Tyrrell, S. J., whose brilliant career 
ended darkly. 

From the point of view of history, recent years have 
done much to awaken interest in the story of Christen- 
dom. One notes in passing the remarkable genius of 
David Urquhart, about whom Gertrude Robinson has 



A MISCEKLANY OF DEFENDERS 357 

published an interesting volume. In the United States 
"A Political and Social History of Western Europe," 
by Carlton J. Hayes, has won merited attention for its 
impartial account of the development of our civiliza- 
tion. The research of Henry Adams brought him to 
the threshold of Catholicism, and "Chartres and St. 
Michel" is a genuinely original study of mediaeval life. 
Proceeding from the architect's interest in Gothic 
structure, Ralph Adams Cram, though an Anglican, 
has set forth admirably the significance of the Chris- 
tian tradition in such books as "The Substance of 
Gothic Art" and "The Nemesis of Mediocrity." 

In the domain of science, English Catholicism has 
done comparatively little of outstanding value. Sir 
Bertram C. A. Windle has set forth the Christian view 
on many subjects with clarity and authority. The 
earlier work of St. George Mivart is not forgotten by 
many students of the origin of species; and the able 
popularizing of James J. Walsh has earned merited 
renown. In addition there are many occasional 
treatises, like "Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist," by 
Dr. Dwight, which we must pass by here. 

Finally, there is the towering figure of Bishop John 
Lancaster Spalding (1840-1916), whose polished and 
incisive essays on the subject of education contain 
much of the best that has been written in this field. 
Bishop Spalding was an eager if quite realistic student 
of life, and his keen appraisal of human intelligence 
made of him almost a great reformer. There is in 
his work not a little of that lapidary quality which 
distinguishes Emerson, and it displays an ability to 
sustain a chain of reasoning which the Concord seer 
never possessed. 



358 CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It is our earnest hope that the literature of Catho- 
lic scholarship will increase and develop influence. 
With the rise to greater power of Catholic institutions 
of learning, with the growth of a Catholic press, the 
authoritative voice of our thought cannot fail to make 
itself more distinctly heard. 



INDEX 



Acton, John Emerich Lord, 

(1834-1902), 194, 198. 
^Esthetic Movement, The, 166, 

167, 180. 
Alighieri, Dante, (1265-1321), 

343. 
Allies, T. W., (1813-1903), 94, 

191, 192. 
American Environment, The, 

294-297. 
Angel in the House, The, 108. 
Apologia pro Vita Sua, 52, 58, 

63, 82. 
Aquinas, St. Thomas, (1225- 

1274), 61, 339. 
Arnold, Matthew, (1822-1888), 

11, 321, 322, 341. 
Art of Thomas Hardy, The, 

177. 
Assisi, St. Francis of, (1182- 

1226), 342. 
A urea Dicta, 144. 
Autobiography of Archbishop 

Ullathorne, The, 99-101. 
Ayscough, John, (see Bicker- 
staff e-Drew). 

Babbitt, Irving, (1865- ), 

330-332. 
Ballad of the White Horse, 

The, 233. 
Banim, John, (1798-1842), 274. 
Banim, Michael, (1796-1874), 

274. 
Barry, William, (1849- ), 17, 

71, 73, 197, 206, 226. 
Baudelaire, Charles, (1821- 

1867), 16, 290, 335, 337. 
Beardsley, Aubrey, (1872- 

1898), 159. 



Beati Mortui, 157. 

Belloc, Hilaire, (1870- ), 
243, 249-267. Individuality 
of, 249 ff; views of, 252 if; 
historical work of, 255 ff; 
social outlook of, 259 ff ; posi- 
tion of, 265 ff; style of, 262. 

Benda, Julien, 334. 

Benson, Robert Hugh, (1871- 
1915), 211-218. 

Bickerstaffe-Drew, Mgr. Fran- 
cis, (1858- ), 219-222. 

Biography, 199, 200. 

Birt, Dom Henry Norbert, 
197. 

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 

(1840- ), 152-154. 

Book Notes, 14, 32, 86, 103, 125, 
146, 165, 186, 207, 222, 248, 
268, 292, 316, 351. 

Bourget, Paul, (1852- ), 
171. 

Bread and Circuses, 163. 

Broad Stone of Honour, The, 
24, ff . 

Brownson, Orestes A., (1803- 
1876), 302. 

Brunetiere, Ferdinand, (1849- 
1906), 324, 335. 

Bunker, John, 314. 

Butler, Alban, (1710-1763), 
200-202. 

Butler, Samuel, (1835-1902), 
253 257. 

Butler, Sir William, (1838- 
1910), 354. 

Callanan, Jeremiah Joseph, 

(1795-1825), 275. 
Callista, 81. 



359 



360 



INDEX 



Camm, Dom Bede, (1884- ), 

197. 
Carberry, Ethna, (Anna Mc- 

Manus), 281, 287. 
Carleton, William, (1794-1869), 

273. 
Carlyle, Thomas, (1795-1881), 

11. 
Cathedrale, La, 21, 212. 
Catholic Poetry, 106, 165. 
Catholic Spirit, The, (Defini- 
tion), 1-3, 13, 325. 
Cervantes, Miguel de, (1547- 

1616), 345. 
Chapman, Dom J. H., (1865- 

), 197. 
Chateaubriand, F. R. de, (1768- 

1848), 8, 15, 16, 333. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, (1340-1400), 

55 344. 
Chesterton, Cecil, (1879-1917), 

354. 
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 

(1874- ), 98, 229-248. 

Career of, 231; work of, 

232 ff; purpose of, 238 ff; 

position of, 241 ff; paradox 

as used by, 243; style of, 

245. 
Christian Year, The, 89, 109. 
Chrysostom, St. John, (347- 

407), 328. 
Circle and the Sword, The, 283. 
Clarke, Isabel, 353. 
Clemens, Samuel, (Mark 

Twain), (1835-1910), 300, 

341. 
Clermont, fimile, 334. 
Cobbett, William, (1762-1835), 

9. 
Cochin, Augustin, 334. 
Colum, Padraic, (1881- ), 

282. 
Compitum, 26. 
Coppee, Francois, (1842-1908), 

324, 335. 
Corkery, Daniel, 287-289. 
Corymbus for Autumn, 136. 
Cram, Ralph Adams, 295, 357. 



Crashaw, Richard, (1613-1649), 

12, 143. 
Crawford, Francis Marion, 

(1854-1909), 208, 224-226. 
Croce, Benedetto, (1866- ), 

331, 343. 

Daly, T. A., (1871- ), 314. 
Davis, Thomas, (1814-1845), 

276. 
Denis, Maurice, 336. 
De Profundis, 159. 
De Vere, Aubrey Thomas, 

(1814-1902), 121. 
Dickens, Charles, (1812-1870), 

10, 158, 349. 
Digby, Kenelm Henry, (1797- 

1880) 15-32, 33. Personality 

of, 17 ff ; style of, 20 ff ; work 

of, 22ff; position of, 30 ff. 
Dolben, Digby, (1848-1867), 

157, 158. 
Douglas, Alfred, (1870- ), 

159, 160. 
Downey, Edward, 353. 
Downing, Ellen, (1828-1869), 

277. 
Dowson, Ernest, (1867-1900), 

159. 
Dream of Oerontius, The, 84. 
Dreiser, Theodore, (1871- ), 

327. 
Dublin University, Newman at, 

48 49. 
Duffy, Charles Gavan, (1816- 

1903), 276. 

Earls, Michael, S.J., 314. 

Eden, Helen Parry, (1852- ), 
163, 164. 

Egan, Maurice Francis, 
(1852- ), 310. 

Eighteenth Century, The, 4-9. 

Eirenicon, The, 90. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, (1803- 
1882), 149, 294, 297. 

England and Ireland in Let- 
ters, 268-270. 

En Route, 212. 



INDEX 



361 



Essay on the Development of 
Christian Doctrine, 44, 68, 78. 

Essay on Winckelmann, 172. 

Europe and the Faith, 262, 263. 

Eve of the Reformation, The, 
195. 

Evenings on the Thames, 28. 

Faber, Frederick William, 

(1814-1863), 93, 94. 
Fabiola, 99. 
Fairbanks, Charles Bullard, 

(1827-1859), 356. 
Fernando, 220. 
Fiction, The Characteristics of 

Modern, 208-210. 
Franciscan Spirit, The, 342. 
Francis, M. E. (Mrs. Frances 

Blundell), 287. 
Freedom and the Catholic 

Mind, 322-324. 
French Letters, Modern, 332- 

336. 
French Revolution, The, (Bel- 

loc), 255. 
Froude, Hurrell, (1802-1836), 

38, 40, 89. 
Fullerton, Georgiana, (1814- 

1885), 211. 
Function of Criticism at the 

Present Time, The, 346-351. 

Garesche, E., S.J., 353. 

Gasquet, Francis Aidan Cardi- 
nal, (1846- ), 194-197. 

Genie du Christianisme, La, 16. 

Gerould, Gordon Hall, 201. 

Gerould, Katherine Fullerton, 
(1879- ), 332. 

Gibbon, Edward, (1737-1794), 
6. 

Goddess of Ghosts, The, 218. 

Goethe, J. W. von, (1749- 
1832), 5. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, (1728-1774), 
6, 7, 270. 

Gracechurch, 220. 

Grammar of Assent, 52, 62, 64, 
65, 66, 67, 79, 174. 



Griffin, Gerald, (1803-1840), 

274. 
Growth of English Catholicism, 

95, 102. 
Guiney, Louise Imogen, (1861- 

1920), 154-157, 179, 277. 

Harris, Joel Chandler, (1848- 

1908), 309. 
Harte, Bret, (1839-1902), 300. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, (1804- 

1864), 297. 
Hecker, Isaac, (1819-1888), 

302. 
Hello, Ernest, (1828-1885), 

149. 
Henry VIII. and the English 

Monasteries, 196. 
Heretics, 236. 
Hinkson, Mrs. (see Katherine 

Tynan) 
History, Catholic Stress Upon, 

188-190, 207. 
History, Importance of, 187, 

188. 
History, The Writing of, 189, 

249. 
Hobbes, John Oliver, (1867- 

1906), 226. 
Holland, Bernard, 18, 206. 
Hopkins, Gerard, (1844-1889), 

115-121. 
Hound of Heaven, The, 134, 

136. 
Howells, William Dean, (1837- 

1920), 300, 336. 
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 183, 185. 
Hughes, Thomas A., S.J., 197. 
Huneker, James Gibbons, 

(1860-1921), 311. 
Huysmans, Joris Karl, (1848- 

1907), 115, 212, 335. 

Idea of a University, 60, 70, 

78, 80. 
Imaginary Portraits, 175. 
Inchbald, Elizabeth, (1753- 

1821), 353. 
Initiation, 216. 



362 



INDEX 



Ireland, John Archbishop, 

(1838-1918), 310. 
Irish Catholicism and Art, 271- 

273, 291, 292. 
Irish Dominicans, The, 197. 

John Inglesant, 211. 

Johnson, Lionel, (1867-1902), 

176-179, 279. 
Johnson, Samuel, (1709-1784), 

6, 7. 
Journalism and Literature, 229. 
Journals of Cardinal Manning, 

The, 97. 
Joyce, James, (1882- ), 290. 

Kavanagh, Rose, (1859-1891), 

280. 
Keble, John, (1792-1866), 38, 

41, 89-91. 
Keon, Miles Gerald, (1821- 

1875), 211. 
Kettle, T. M., (1880-1916), 284, 

292. 
Kilmer, Aline, 314. 
Kilmer, Joyce, (1886-1918), 

313. 
King, Mrs. Hamilton, 352. 
Kingsley, Charles, (1819-1875), 

51, 52. 

Lanier, Sidney, (1842-1881), 

299. 
Lawrence, D. H., 210, 330. 
Ledwidge, Francis, 282. 
Leslie, Shane, (1885- ), 100, 

153, 204-206, 268. 
Life of Cardinal Manning, The, 

204. 
Life of Cardinal Newman, The, 

203. 
Life of Francis Thompson, 

The, 206. 
Lilly, W. S., (1840-1921), 319, 

355. 
Lingard, John, (1771-1851), 

192-194. 
Lisle, Ambrose Philips de, 17, 

24, 206. 



Lives of the Saints, (Butler), 

200-202. 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 

(1807-1882), 298. 
Longueville, Thomas, 356. 
Love Sonnets of Proteus, 153. 



Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 

(1800-1859), 10. 
MacDonagh, Thomas, (1875- 

1916), 270, 283. 
MacGill, Patrick, 291. 
MacLeod, Fiorna, (1855-1905), 

289. 
MacManus, Seumas, (1870- ), 

286. 
Magic, 236. 

Maher, Richard Aumerle, 312. 
Maistre Joseph de, (1754-1821), 

330. 
Mallock, W. H., 355. 
Mangan, James Clarence, 

(1803-1849), 277-279. 
Manning, Henry Edward, 

(1808-1892), 50, 95-98. 
Marie Antoinette, 256. 
Maritain, Jacques, 342. 
Marius the Epicurean, 173. 
Martindale, C. C, S. J., (1879- 

), 206, 218. 
Mary Tudor, 122. 
Masefield, John, (1875- ), 

161, 185. 
Maynard, Theodore, 162, 163. 
McNamara, Brinsly, 291. 
Mediaeval Outlook, The, 240, 

337-345. 
Meredith, George, (1828-1909), 

11, 349. 
Merry England, 127. 
Meynell, Alice, (1850- ), 

115, 137, 149-152. 
Meynell Everard, (1882- ), 

138, 206. 
Meynell, Wilfrid, (1852- ), 

127. 
Miller, J. Corson, 314. 
Monsieur Henri, 155. 



INDEX 



363 



Moore, George, (1857- ), 

290, 327. 
Moore, Leslie, 226. 
Moore, Thomas, (1779-1852), 

274, 275. 
More, Paul Elmer, (1864- ), 

58, 330. 
More, Sir Thomas, (1478-1535), 

3, 341. 
Mores Catholici, 21 ff. 
Mulholland, Rosa, (1869-1921), 

287. 
Murray, Amy, 289. 
My New Curate, 286. 

Napoleon of Nottmg Hill, The, 
235. 

Nation, The, 276. 

Naturalism in Literature, 326- 
330. 

Newman, John Henry Cardinal, 
(1801-1890), 33-86. General 
characteristics of, 34 ff; 
early life of, 36 ff; at Ox- 
ford, 39 ff; Catholic life of, 
44 ff; failure of, 49 ff; inner 
spirit of, 54 ff; thought of, 
56 ff; system of, 69; philo- 
sophical significance of, 70; 
art of, 73 ff; controversial 
manner of, 74 ff; style of, 75 
ff; sermons of, 76 ff; ver- 
satility of, 80 ff; poetry of, 
84; literary genius of, 85 ff; 
historical work of, 190-191. 

New Jerusalem, The, 238. 

O'Connell, Daniel, (1775-1847), 

276. 
O'Connor, Armael, (1880- ), 

353. 
O'Donnell, Charles Leo, 

(1884- ), 314. 
O'Duffy, Eimar, 291. 
O'Hagan, John, (1822-1890), 

277. 
O'Neill, Moira, 281. 
O'Reilly, John Boyle, (1844- 

1890), 309. 



O'Riordan, Conal, 291. 

Oddsfish, 214. 

Oldmeadow, Ernest, 354. 

One Poor Scruple, 223. 

Orthodoxy, 237. 

Oxford Movement, The, 37-44, 

88, 89. 
Oxford Sermons, The, 39, 77. 

Paganism: Old and New, 141. 
Pascal, Blaise, (1623-1662), 71, 

337, 349. 
Pater, Walter Horatio, (1839- 

1894), 168-176, 338. 
Path to Rome, The, 257. 
Patmore, Coventry, (1823- 

1896), 108-115, 124, 139, 144, 

161, 242. 
Paul, C. Kegan, (1856-1902) 9 

95, 122. 
Pearse, Padraic, 283, 284. 
Plunkett, George Noble, 

(1851- ), 285. 
Plunkett, Joseph Mary, (1887- 

1916), 283. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, (1809-1849), 

299. 
Poetry, Modern, 160, 161. 
Poetry, The Nature of, 104-106, 

147-149. 
Pre-Raphaelites, The, 180. 
Proctor, Adelaide, (1825-1864), 

158, 159. 
Prout, Father, (1804-1866), 

275. 
Puritan Influence in America, 

The, 297, 298, 303, 305, 314. 
Pusey, Edward, (1800-1882), 

91. 

Bamona, (H. H. Jackson), 

313. 
Reid, Christian, (Mrs. Frances 

Tiernan), (1846-1920), 312. 
Renaissance, The, 172. 
Renan, Ernest, (1823-1892), 71. 
Repplier, Agnes, (1857- ), 

311. 
Rhythm of Life, The, 115. 



364 



INDEX 



Bod, Boot and Flower, 114. 
Rossetti, Christina, (1830- 

1894), 182-185. 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, (1828- 

1882), 181, 182. 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, (1712- 

1778), 4, 7, 331, 333. 
Boussecm and Bomanticism, 

330. 
Ruskin, John, (1819-1900), 11, 

31, 167-169, 330. 
Ryan, Abram, (1839-1886), 309. 

Sales, St. Francis de, 21, 328. 
San Celestino, 219. 
Saracinesca, 225. 
Scott, Sir Walter, (1771-1832), 

8, 15, 208. 
Search after Proserpine, 121. 
Second Spring, The, 77. 
Sentimentalists, The, 216. 
Servile State, The, 259. 
Shairp, J. C, (1819-1885), 36. 
Shakespeare, William, (1564- 

1616), 243, 344, 345. 
Shea, John Gilmary, (1824- 

1892), 198, 199. 
Sheehan, Patrick Canon, (1852- 

1913), 286. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, (1792- 

1822), 8, 141. 
Shelley, 141, 142. 
Shorter, Mrs. Clement, (see 

Sigerson, Dora). 
Shorthouse, Joseph Henry, 

(1834-1903), 211. 
Sigerson, Dora, 281. 
Sight and Insight, 139. 
Sister Songs, 135 t 
Smith, John Talbot, (1855- 

), 312. 
Snead-Cox, H. G., 204. 
Southern Influence in American 

Letters, The, 298. 
South Sea Idyls, 303. 
Spalding, John Lancaster 

Bishop, (1840-1916), 357. 
Spearman, Frank, (1859- ), 

312. 



St. John, Ambrose, (1815- 

1875), 54, 82. 
St. Peter's Chains, 121. 
Standards in Art, 319-322, 325, 

345. 
Stoddard, Charles Warren, 

(1843-1909), 303-306. 
Strickland, Agnes, (1796-1874), 

206. 
Synon, Mary, 353. 

Tabb, John Bannister, (1845- 
1909), 306-308. 

Taine, Hippolyte, (1828-1892), 
325, 334. 

Thompson, Francis, (1859- 
1907), 127-146. Life of, 128 
ff; poetry of, 132 ff; prose 
of, 140 ff; position of, 145. 

Tracts for the Times, 42. 

Tynan, Katherine, (1861- ), 
279, 280, 287. 

Ullathorne, Archbishop, (1806- 

1889), 100, 101. 
Unknown Eros, The, 112. 

Valdes, Palacio, (1853- ), 

350. 
Vaughn, Herbert, (1832-1903), 

99. 
Victorian Age, The, 9-12. 

Walsh, Thomas, (1875- ), 

314. 
Ward, Mrs. Wilfrid, (1861- 

), 222-224. 
Ward, Wilfrid, (1856-1916), 75, 

85, 202-204. 
Ward, William George, (1812- 

1882), 43, 50, 76, 92, 93. 
Waters of Twilight, The, 218. 
Western Influence in American 

Letters, The, 300. 
Whitman, Walt, (1819-1892), 

298. 
Wilde, Oscar, (1856-1900), 159, 

179, 292. 
Wiseman, Nicholas Cardinal, 

(1802-1865), 43, 98, 99. 



INDEX 365 

(181 
Yellow Bittern, The, 288. 



Yeats, William Butler, (1865- j Zola, Emile, (1840-1902), 66, 

), 282, 285. 333, 336. 



<■<$ ,1"',.' 











%^ : 









v %. Y * ° /• ^ V * * * « 









Ox j o 














^ "A,# «A^I 














9^ y o ♦ x D 















% . ^^inifcLV^ 








y v * n . %. \> „ * * o . <fe 






1 / <b:'~'T.YA<P 




;/ 




- #% 









^ 
^P 



^irtkf.% **^>* <°^^v** 



^0^ 








^ 






cPVi^'O^ 



'••WzxS' 




